Content Log

A Manifesto for Social Computing in the Enterprise

Investment in the infrastructure of the internet has dramatically increased bandwidth to everyone in the developing world and created home computers that are not only inexpensive, but very powerful. This change has expanded the usage of the internet exponentially and introduced new demographics and generations of users that had not used computing prior to the expansion of the internet. These users have themselves created the content and applications that feed the internet and have set expectations of the applications that we use in web browsers and new mobile devices. The increased bandwidth has made this experience much more interactive and visual experience encompassing video and visual elements. Web properties such as YouTube, Google, Amazon, Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr have set the benchmark for expression, accessibility and social interaction of computing systems.

Dubbed Web 2.0, this revolution in computing has shifted the face of software from a logical, linear, and introverted science to an expressive, graphical and social art. New designers of web sites, unschooled in traditional software techniques, are nonetheless able to create software that scales to millions of users and billions of objects of information and still meld those users into an artistically aware community. The next generation of enterprise employees who started using the internet in their early teens have only known this evolving culture of free and creative development of the internet and now demand better of the enterprise software that they meet. Older employees also know that that the software that they use on a day to day basis can be better. Enterprise 2.0 seeks to emulate the success of Web 2.0 in the creation of new software for the enterprise.

Social Computing

The shift of computing power from business logic and calculation to socialization and people-orientation has been dubbed by some as Social Computing. The term Social Computing has been used interchangeably with Enterprise 2.0 or Enterprise Social Applications, however, IBM and Microsoft have created Social Computing research centers and Forrester has started to use the term in describing next generation enterprise collaboration. Social Computing is the use of technology to support sharing of information and enabling collaboration through social networks and to tap into the value of the “Wisdom of Crowds”, a concept made famous by James Surowiecki in 2004 to explain how many people are smarter than individual experts. Social Computing exploits software oriented toward people and Social Networks, the extended relationships of individuals, to connect to more people and access the Wisdom of Crowds.

To tap into the wisdom and awareness of social networks and empower people to collaborate at any time or place, Social Computing platforms need the following capabilities:

• People - Support information about people, their preferred communications, their relationships and affiliations, since social networking is all about people rather than just systems, data and objects. The more information available about other users, the more likely they can be found as a source of knowledge.
• Context of Networks - Social networks organized around projects, teams and departments provide the context of work and relevance of information as it spreads from creation to the people that need that information. Social networks, especially networks extended beyond the enterprise, provide the greatest differentiation of social computing from previous generations of collaboration.
• Social Collaboration - Provide an environment where people can share ideas, contribute knowledge and solve problems in creative, unstructured socialization as opposed to rigorous workflows that are required for control of information. Next generation tools use techniques developed by Web 2.0, particularly those tools that empower social knowledge, such as social tagging, integration of communication and awareness of changes in social networks.
• Content as a Service - Content is the container of knowledge and information and is core to the socialization of information. Content needs to be accessible everywhere, not just in large, monolithic applications. Content capabilities need to be accessible as reusable service components. Social computing can happen inside the enterprise or outside and a channel can be a web site, web application, mobile device or even external web platforms such as Facebook or Google applications. Mashups can occur inside the enterprise or outside and the channel will require content as a service that can securely be accessed wherever it is needed or wherever it is contributed.
• People-centric Tools - As Web 2.0 has spread new paradigms of user interaction, the consumerization of software has created expectations that enterprise software becomes easier and empowers user to contribute, correct and classify content and information within the context of social networks. AJAX and next generation rich internet application interfaces such as Adobe Flex will provide users with a much richer, more intuitive user experience and the ability to scan much more social knowledge to find ideas and solutions. These tools should themselves be componentized and accessible as a service so that they may be mashed up with other sources of social knowledge.

This does not mean that the need for traditional enterprise content technologies such as document and records management goes away. They are still repositories of the truth and verifiable information and thus play an important role in sharing knowledge within social networks. However, these traditional technologies lack the usability, empowerment, and breadth of reach that Web 2.0 sites provide. They lack the collaborative nature that invites in people without barriers and restrictions to contribute to the sharing of knowledge and information. Web content management for creating a richer Web 2.0-style user interface becomes even more important to this collaboration to provide a compelling face to the interaction and to simplify the access and navigation of shared information. Enterprise Content Management cannot become one of the principle platforms of Social Computing unless it addresses the requirements of Social Applications.

Use of Social Computing

The balance is shifting from contained and controlled companies to engaged and empowered collaborative enterprises driven by Web 2.0-inspired social computing. At the center of the shift from old models of computing in the enterprise to new social models are companies that are inspired to innovate or to engage more with their customers. This includes companies not just using their internet or intranet web sites, but engaging in social networking channels such as Yahoo, Google, YouTube, Facebook and MySpace. Those using social computing are interested in engaging people, such as customers, employees or partners. They are using new people-centric tools and facilitate creating or extending existing social networks.

Major ECM vendors are all planning their Social Computing efforts and to a large extent are being dragged in this direction by their more forward-looking customers. Enterprises that have discovered the value of Social Computing are:

• Consumer-oriented companies that particularly address a younger demographic must engage their customers as part of both the marketing process as well as the development of new products. For example, games and film companies that engage their viewers in plot and scene development do much better than those that keep everything under wraps until the game or film is ready.
• Enterprises hiring a new generation of knowledge workers who grew up on the internet must provide tools as empowering as those available from Web 2.0. Turning these tools off forces these workers to seek employment elsewhere and forcing them to use tools that do not meet their expectations of usability and engagement.
• Financial Services firms are leading the shift in usage of these technologies. Financial Services have always been innovators in developing new technologies and investing in providing better service for their clients. Speed in innovation in these services becomes a major competitive advantage where churn of clients can be very high in turbulent times. Internally, competition for talent is intense and providing better support is important for attracting and retaining employees. In particular, young and ambitious brokers and managers are more likely to be sociable themselves and seek out Social Computing inside and outside the enterprise.
• Government and Non-Profit organizations that provide services and citizen feedback online find increasing their IT budgets much easier than those that merely arbitrated by a front-line service. It is now inconceivable for an American politician to run for office without an extended internet presence such as Facebook or YouTube.
• Enterprises that have faster cycles of product innovation, especially high tech, are looking to their customers and partners to participate in the development of new products and services. In previous generations, the field acted as a filtering mechanism of new customer requirements and ideas. However, today technology can provide a frictionless way of getting the entire enterprise to exchange ideas and improvements with the customer communities.

Integrating Social Computing

Because Social Computing is unlikely to come from a single source, especially because of the diversity of sources of knowledge and social networks available on Web 2.0, it is extremely important for the enterprise infrastructure for Social Computing to be integrated with those sources. This means bring these sources into the enterprise and bring the enterprise sources out to Web 2.0. No matter where the people collaborating are, the tools they want should be available. To facilitate this, the Social Computing should be:

• Open Source - Through being developed through social computing paradigms and sharing best of breed components with the open source community, open source systems have evolved rapidly and encompass social computing capabilities developed by the open source community. Social tools such as MediaWiki, the wiki that powers Wikipedia, and WordPress, the most popular blogging software were developed using open source.
• Integrating the Inside Out - By providing content as a service and enabling light-weight, Web-Oriented scripting development, the Social Computing platform should quickly integrate content services into external channels and web sites, such as Facebook and iGoogle, to allow enterprises to engage customers, partners and home workers.
• Integrating the Outside In - If the Social Computing platform is modular and supports a Web 2.0-style mashup-oriented architecture, it enables users and teams to integrate external open source tools and social networking web services, such as Facebook, LinkedIn or other Open Social-enabled properties, to tap into the wisdom of crowds available on the internet and to make customers and partners part of team collaboration.
• REST-style Architecture - A Web 2.0-style or REST-style of architecture using easy, light-weight scripting languages and integrated through internet standards-based APIs can easily mash-up content services into any web-oriented application or web site. These architectures should be scalable, fault-tolerant and high performance to meet any enterprise or internet requirement.
• Choice - The Social Computing platform should be based upon open interfaces developed by the open source community to provide choice of operating system, database, application server, content authoring tools or APIs.

Over the past year and continuing into the coming year, Alfresco is dedicated to expanding its architecture and applications to enable this vision of Social Computing. We will work with partners and open source community to provide best of breed open source tools for enabling this architecture. We will integrate with external Social Computing properties such as Facebook and the Open Social alliance to expand the breadth of social networks and the ability to collaborate through those networks. We will be expanding the Alfresco system’s understanding of users as people and facilitate sharing of information and content through their networks. We will be open in the process and seek and encourage your feedback and participation.

Dad, did you have television back in 1994?

Last night we were watching the Seven Ages of Rock on our Sky Plus (Tivo-like machine) that has been playing on the BBC. The most recent age starts with Morrisey and the Smiths and focuses mainly on the mid-90s competition between Oasis and Blur. My 12-year old son, who wasn't even born before their rivalry began, asked if Noel Gallagher of Oasis had Tourette's Syndrome after watching his interviews. Yes son, but it's not nice to make fun of the disadvantaged.

This seemed like a long time ago, but it looks even longer ago when you see this video posted by John Battelle. "In the future...you will be able to expand into new markets at low cost." Click here if you can't see the video.

You have to feel sorry for Digital. They should have invented the PC, they could have been Microsoft (where did Allchin's team come from after all), and they could have been Google (with Alta Vista). But weren't they prescient?

For video on Seven Ages of Rock, click here.

Open Source and Business Pleasure vs. Business Pain

A European PR firm was pitching my company for business last week and putting out a few ideas on how to generate demand in different countries across Europe. One of the ideas that they presented was a “business pain barometer” to indicate how much pain companies might be feeling using existing enterprise systems. This didn’t exactly resonate as a value proposition for open source, but it is a tried and true campaign strategy for traditional enterprise systems. Selling pain relief has worked for the last three decades to sell enterprise software, but has it run its course?

Read the rest of this entry »

Rudyard Kipling on Innovation

Portrait of Kipling at the National Portrait Gallery - one of my favorite museums

I found this quote by Rudyard Kipling, author of Gunga Din and the Jungle Book (remember Mowgli and Baloo?), when I worked at Documentum. I found it amusing that we would come up with an innovation and everyone would copy it. We would compete against other companies with capabilities like virtual documents, object models, auditing, query languages and workflow.  We would focus on vertical solutions and use the crossing the chasm model and then you would see the competition do the same thing. Kipling said:

They copied all that they could follow
but they couldn't copy my mind
and I left 'em sweating and stealing
a year and a half behind.

But then we lost our eye on the ball. After Version 2.0 of Documentum, I really investigated the web, but I found a real lack of enthusiasm to apply Documentum to the web. Some Documentum people seemed to think that there would be a richer set of protocols on their way. I remember speaking to Jeff Miller who said that this was very interesting, but FileNet was our competition and we should have a laser-like focus on dominating that market. Kipling said:

And they asked me how I did it,
and I gave 'em the Scripture text,
"You keep your light so shining
a little in front o' the next!"

We started doing to the competition what they had done to us. About the time that Dave DeWalt came on board, we took on Interwoven using their own game. We came to match their capabilities and for awhile get ahead. This became the foundation for the Enterprise Content Management platform. Howard Shao then scouted the other missing pieces of a larger puzzle that included digital asset management, digital rights management and imaging. That force of innovation is now gone from Documentum and we will see how the next generation rises to the challenge.

The quotes from Kipling come from a poem called The “Mary Gloster”.  It is about a dying old man who made his fortune the good, olde Victorian way. The man has grown bitter to see his seemingly ne’er-do-well son not know the benefits of hard work and keeping close to the roots of the old man’s success - the Sea. Those forces of innovation have died and he looking on to a better life in the hereafter. In case you are wondering, I’m not very religious, but I always like a good parable and object lesson.

Unlike the old man, I have had the chance to try it again and I love it. Interestingly, I am seeing the same pattern. We have been out long enough to start to see people copying what we are doing. We can’t be complacent though, there is still a lot of innovating to do.

There may be an object lesson as well for the next generation. I once wrote about the fact that the younger generation is not interested in computer science and information technology. Perhaps Web 2.0 is changing that or there are new sources of wealth around the corner. But just as wealth moved on from Britain in Dickie's generation, perhaps that wealth is now moving on to the developing world (the BRIC countries - Brazil, Russia, India, China) where they are interested in core value creation around boring old things like computer science.