The Social Organization

The Future of the Social Web

 It's hard to step out of my little world sometimes - my online world consists of the following social tools:

• LinkedIn
• TypePad
• Blogger
• WordPress
• Facebook
• Twitter
• FriendFeed
• Google Reader
• ShareThis
• Zmanta
• TweetDeck
• TweetWorks
• PBwiki
• Utterli
• Flickr
• Ning
• Akismet
• OpenID
• Google Analytics/Feedburner
• TwitterSheep (tool or toy...too close to call!)

I could go on...but my real point is I think I'm a little odd. I explore, I pick up new tools because they are there. I don't think most people are like that and...I think it distracts me a lot of the time from doing 'real' work. It is easy to lose hours lost in a pretty complex web of tools - some of which are integrated and some of which are not, many of which do not add much to my existance other than to feed my unhealthy compulsion with gadgetry.

This is insanity. This is why the vast majority of people use Facebook and call it a day. This is why Google ends up sucking us in because at least our email, feed reader, calendar, and documents are centralized and sharable with the same network of friends.

Open APIs and standards such as OpenID are helping but they do not necessarily ensure centralized control. And because the ability to give the user fine grain control over sharing and privacy - that is extremely easy to use - has not been figured out yet, we aren't really ready for centralized control anyway. But you can get a glimmer of how this world is going to work out there on the consumer web.

This world is fast encroaching on the enterprise. And in someways, because the social network is more defined and there is more centralized control of access and authentication, enterprise IT has a leg up. However, enterprise IT departments need to start thinking about a few things:

• How to integrate a variety of social tools with identity, presence, unified communications, individual workflow, productivity tools, enterprise apps, & accounting/ERP systems.
• How to provide individuals with control over the tools they use, their distribution channels, and settings on their social graph.
• How to give enough 'open' controls to users to allow them to configure and mashup additional tools and widgets they they find useful even though it is not part of the enterprise stack. Because people like me will always be lurking around and 'breaking' things otherwise.
• How to use an SOA architecture in a way that enables individuals to have custom solutions. Imagine everyone in the organization having their own application that seamlessly integrates the productivity, publication, communication, intelligence, and enterprise management features that they need with appropriate information & content in a way that was focused on their responsibilities and goals? All integrated with a social graph and managed through presence such that a person's information stream turned off when they were 'off' and general requests got re-routed to others and then switched back on when they were ready to work - letting through anything that was urgent and for which the individual had no substitute?
• Imagine a resource management solution that was flexible enough to handle emergent activities. An employee gets involved in a project for which they are not directly responsible but their contribution is 'accounted' for and if they end up playing a larger role in the project it automatically shows up as a line item on their time sheet and a notation is automatically made in their HR record so that when their manager sets up a review s/he is aware of the attentional contribution that was made.

'Social' in the enterprise will not be about a destination or a tool - it will be the method by which information is filtered, how collaboration happens, how information is shared/distributed, how contributions are judged, and ultimately it will allow for more fluid and organic careers. Rather than working in one role and always getting 'assigned' to projects, individuals' experience, skills, and interests can determine how they get involved with new projects and how they get compensated/rewarded and moved through the organization. We don't yet have the tools that integrate in a way to make this easily manageable but it's coming.

I've seen the argument to this that goes something like 'people will always need to be assigned to things because there will always be things that no one wants to do in large enterprises'. I agree that there are things that just need to be done - repeatedly - over and over but I disagree that you will never get people to do them.  There are a lot of people out there that like operating in their comfort zone on discrete tasks that they can do, spend 8 hours a day doing, feel like they've contributed, and go home satisfied. In this new world that is still an option and organizations will still need to staff such that they have the right mix of people to do all the different things they need done.  Those individuals will also likely get customized apps that have a more limited stream and breadth of content, fewer communications channels, and more discrete functionality. And that is OK.

I'm starting to see this world take shape - in fits and starts. What do you think the primary barriers to this are? What are the underlying technologies and how will they need to change - or are they ready today?

Search Reconsidered - Yahoo!'s Open Search

Today Yahoo! announced details about its open search project in a move that changes the debate about what search effectiveness is.  For years the discussions around search have focused on relevancy of the query results and the algorithms that prioritize what gets shown first.  But Yahoo! is now showing that relevancy is only one part of the search process.  Just as important is how quickly the user can act on the results.

Yahoo!'s Open Search platform will allow anyone to add data and semantic relationships to Yahoo!'s index.  Take a search for a Cannon Elph for example - an online store like Amazon could provide Yahoo! both the link to its Canon Elph products and links to a photo, reviews, product details, and a buy button.  When the user searches at Yahoo! for a Cannon Elph they would see the Amazon link to the product page alongside the photo, a link directly to reviews, basic product details, and a buy button.

This dramatically changes the conversation from "Did the query result in the most relevant content" (which may be a little esoteric for users anyway) to "How effectively did search get the user to their destination".  Wow.  It makes the user's goal, not the search alone, the primary focus.

A couple of weeks ago I published a post call "Publishing is for Acting" which highlights that people both post and consume information in order to *do* something with it.  Yahoo! just  created a workflow around the information that gives users a way to seamlessly move from their initial search to the action they want to take.

I'll be looking for more nifty announcements to follow - I can't wait to see how developers use this.

The Case for Enterprise Social Networking

While Mzinga was twittering this morning, Neighborhood America was using YouTube:

Mzinga Acquires Prospero

I couldn't end the day without pointing to the news that Mzinga has acquired Prospero. Chris Brogan pointed out that one of the cooler things that they did with the announcement was to use social media to do the launch - as witnessed by an active conversation on Twitter this morning. While that was cool, what I like about Mzinga is:

- They have internal enterprise solutions for eLearning and HR
- They have external enterprise solutions for B2B customer and partner communities
- They now have consumer-oriented solutions
- Prospero has a very distributed architecture with APIs so social functionality can be distributed and integrated with other content and functionality.
- Mzinga has the marketing and management strength to growth the company.

But others are not sleeping: Passenger and HiveLive just raised money; Cisco early last year bought 5Across, Neighborhood America bought MOVO Mobile, OneSite bought Social Platform...

Competition is also coming from enterprise communication and collaboration applications, content management vendors, and enterprise search platforms.  Microsoft recently announced that SharePoint Server sales have surpassed $1B.  Enterprises who want to deploy communities have plenty of options and it is already clear there is huge demand for this so there will be plenty of room in the market for multiple solutions.  The winners will likely be those that not only have interesting and flexible technology but the services and experience to make companies successful.

Why Social Technologies Matter

Management by committee  has always had a negative connotation.  In the physical world, communities are very good for social connection but fairly bad at governance and decision-making. Why?

• Understanding all the concerns and issues of various constituents is time consuming and often asynchronous.
• Getting consensus can require multiple conversations with a variety of stakeholders - some of which get on board with a decision only to change their mind and then need to be convinced again. This process is typically fragmented and time consuming.
• Decision-making is often exclusive.  Because inclusion and mass consensus is so costly, small exclusive groups often make decisions for the entire community and this drives a lot of political maneuvering.  Those with the best political skills often are the ones to get decision-making authority regardless of experience.

How does online technology change this?

• Transparency: anyone in the community can see discussions and, critically, relationships between people.
• Inclusiveness: More people can be involved in vetting ideas because the discussion can be centralized, structured if necessary, and ongoing over time.
• Persistence: Decisions and the concerns that are vetted are available as long as needed and can be referred to by everyone to ensure that execution is consistent with the original decision.
• Conversational: Roughly 70% of information is unstructured...being able to capture conversation is critical to knowledge management and knowledge retention and comes with layers of meaning (tone, participants, etc.) that formal documents may not.
• Low Barriers to Participate: Online people can lurk, they can rate, they can comment, or they can create substantive content - whatever they are comfortable with and ready to do.  This has huge value in getting more people involved and engaged.

Technology enables organization by committee in a way that is not long and torturous and thus, opens up the floodgates for more input, better decisions, and more engaged participants.

If you are and IDC client and interested in hearing more, I will be giving a presentation at Directions in San Jose on March 11th and in Boston on March 19th based on a research piece I wrote called The Social Enterprise: How Social Networking Changes Everything.

What is your perspective on this?  Why does technology matter?