special focus
WEB2.0

 

With all the hype and talk surrounding Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and anything that carries the merest whiff of “social media” doing the rounds, you’d be forgiven for thinking we’re simply floating through the next big bubble.
Even as investors pump hundreds of millions of dollars into “Web 2.0” offerings that have taken the online world by storm, the cautiously inclined readily point to the fact that as yet, none of these sites has turned a profit and, so far, none has indicated any method by which they can do so.

HYPE GOES HYPER?

It’s all well and good to rely on the belief that some smart, geeky type will finally see through the hype and into the readies, but with memories of the dotbomb resurrected by the more recent crash-and-burn, it’s hardly a done deal. We could well be on the cusp of a real Next Big Thing, but who’s to say someone’s not going to come along and stick a pin in it all?

Web 2.0 doesn’t begin and end with Facebook; managed well, it can open new channels for the enterprise. Imagine being able to bridge the communications gap between management and workers, across functions, all using the same tools your kids use to chat online, share photos or collaborate on something in real time. It’s not just about adapting spaces that many still view as essentially a playground/productivity vampire (not to mention bandwidth-thief) – organisations such as SAP, Sun Microsystems and IBM are using Web 2.0 technologies to drive innovation and productivity. Your organisation may not wish to embrace the sort of open-ended, creativity-encouraging workplace atmosphere that Google has become famous for, but many highly-successful organisations are beginning to see beyond the site-block facility and starting to come up with a few ideas of their own.

It’s what the Web’s all about

Essentially, Web 2.0 is all about a more collaborative Web where people exchange ideas, build on them and engage in ad-hoc networks in the hope of building on new ideas and initiatives. As inventor Tim Berners-Lee told IBM in a Developer Works interview, Web 2.0 does “what the Web was supposed to be doing all along,” i.e. connecting people. Berners-Lee referred to Web 2.0 as a “piece of jargon”, pointing out that current offerings use the same standards produced by those who worked on Web 1.0, although usage patterns and the application processes and devices driving them have certainly changed. What we have seen is a return to the collaborative/editing functions that Berners-Lee and co. had originally included before the development emphasis turned to a semi-passive browsing experience that many came to understand as “the Web” in the early days.

New tools applied to well-established software can give you the opportunity to empower everyone in the organisation to continually hone processes and improve communications, all using relatively light-weight services and applications. Questions remain regarding the real innovative and financial value of Web 2.0, with much of the debate centring around whether these platforms just represent a faddy way of doing things or can genuinely drive productivity, efficiency and innovative thinking. Oracle seems to think that they can achieve the latter, stating in a recent whitepaper that “social networking will succeed where earlier approaches to collaboration, such as traditional knowledge management, have failed.” The reasoning? “The next generation of collaborative work will be defined by the shift from information handling to interactive management, or socialisation. Social networks... might seem at first to be more about play than about work but... it is precisely such play and the recurring stickiness it engenders that will allow people to tap into the collective knowledge of their co-workers.”

Thanks to innovations in Web development, including Ruby on Rails and AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), Web pages and applications have become easier to use, more interactive and increasingly responsive. Working at faster speeds, the bring something of a double-edged sword – they’re so good that, even as they enhance customer experience, they increase expectations. Far from being a channel in its own right (as it once was), the Web has exploded into the ultimate platform with content as a driving force.
Treading softly

While it’s true that in a lot of cases, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it, that’s not to say that many of the “soft” ROI aspects of something like enhanced collaboration should be dismissed. As Gartner analyst Anthony Bradley put it in a recent blog post, trying to nail down the ROI for social networking in the enterprise is rather like “Building a business case for a toolbox...you can only talk in generalities.” Bradley added that “Although you can’t build a generic universal business case for social software, you can build a business case for a specific well defined business purpose that is enabled via social software.”

A key inhibitor is definitely the notion that Web 2.0 applications and technologies cannot be controlled. This is ground that has been worked over many times before – from email to the Internet and, before them, even the suggestion of cross-functional collaboration; resistance to change is as much a given as change itself. Common sense points to the logic of sharing ideas and that a culture of openness within any organisation will yield better-motivated employees. A combination of both is likely to lead to increased productivity.

Measuring success without any clear vision of what you’re trying to achieve is pointless. Setting up a company blog just because it seems to be the trend is unlikely to garner any kudos and might even do more harm than good. Similarly, a random company wiki with little or no clear ownership and direction can quickly disintegrate into petty kingdoms in which users do little more than contradict each other or engage in one-up-manship – hardly the vision of collaboration that most such projects set out with. Applications such as Facebook and Twitter can equally do more harm than good if you don’t take a planned approach to them – and the first question you need to ask is why you want to do it. If the only/main answer you’re coming up with is “because everyone else is” or something along the lines of “it’s the buzz”... back to the drawing board. The immediacy of the Web and the relative anonymity it offers makes it a very unforgiving place to be.

AT THE CORE OF THE SOCIAL WEB

According to Oracle, the “Enterprise Social Web” has a number of core requirements, among them:

• Foundational services: Unlike its consumer counterpart, the enterprise social Web has many mission-critical processes and often has to adhere to regulatory requirements. As such, there is a need for foundational services relating to high availability, security and integration with existing systems and applications in support of confidentiality, reliability and other requirements. These services include user profiling, content management, presentation services, application integration, delegated management and security.

• Social bookmarking and tagging: These allow users to categorise content or people with keywords or tags, effectively creating a personal taxonomy that can be represented visually for easy navigation or shared among colleagues.

• User-generated content: Tools such as wikis and blogs are critical to fostering information creation and collaboration, allowing one-to-many conversations and empowering users to inject personal knowledge into the context of work requirements.

• Rich, dynamic user profiles: Extending beyond the limits of simple employee profiles, rich contextual information about a colleague and their activities could show what products and projects they’re responsible for or conferences they’ve attended, offering enhanced opportunities for collaboration beyond the traditional hierarchical company view.

• Really Simple Syndication: RSS can offer a link between information inside the organisation and content outside, all behind the security of the firewall. For example, sales and marketing could receive alerts each time a particular client closed a deal. The information could be combined with other sources, such as press releases and industry blogs to offer a useful, context-based tool to generate new business and ideas.

Using social Web applications and tools such as mashups, organisations can track both their competition and their customers, allowing them to uncover new business opportunities while finding ways to extend and consolidate existing relationships. Collaboration, driven by social media and Web 2.0 tools, can allow information to be pooled and shared effectively across all functions. Mashups tapping into existing enterprise applications such as CRM or ERP systems can extend the value of data.

COLLABORATION IS KING

According to IBM’s global CEO study for 2008, 71% of respondents rated collaboration as a “very important” aspect of both innovation and business success generally, with 71% putting their beliefs into action through plans to “focus on collaboration and partnerships” in order to “gain efficiencies, fend off competitive threats and avoid commoditisation.”

IBM’s research indicates that organisations engaged in extensive collaboration tended to out-perform their peers in key business performance indicators, such as revenue growth and profit margins. These findings are backed up by Frost and Sullivan which, using its “collaboration index” to measure the effects of collaboration capabilities and collaboration quality of key performance indicators, found that collaboration has a stronger association with overall business performance, including innovation, productivity, customer satisfaction and profitability than strategy orientation or market turbulence. According to IBM, “collaboration is one of the most critical capabilities IT can provide.” Most Web 2.0 applications are, at heart, all about collaboration.

Overall, says IBM, there’s a clear need to link IT-related collaboration initiatives to bigger business goals, requiring CIOs to set thorough, measurable strategies capable of addressing the complexities of the extended enterprise. Collaboration strategies

IBM has identified four dimensions that should be addressed in any collaboration strategy: • Segmentation model: These establish who does what and how each function interacts, drawing distinctions between different classes of innovators, business segments and activity domains.

• Assessment: Once segmentation is in place, CIOs can effectively assess existing collaborative practices and determine the next steps. Key here is the identification of collaboration gaps, inhibitors and opportunities. It is not unusual for an assessment to uncover significant roadblocks.

• Metrics: For a collaboration strategy to add value to the business, the plans for improvement must be measurable. Held accountable by the business, CIOs must be able to show the concrete results of initiatives.

• Plan: A plan addressing culture, technology, services and the extended enterprise is now possible. Using the greater insights gained from the previous three steps, it’s easier to develop more effective, incremental plans for improvement. Platform for communications and collaboration

In a related vein, Cisco has identified the components of a business-relevant, enterprise communications and collaboration platform:

• Identify and implement the right platform building blocks. These include industry Web 2.0 tools, unified communications technologies and infrastructure and foundation components.

• Drive an integrated workforce experience through an intelligent framework that combines voice, video, data and collaboration. New business capabilities begin to emerge from existing tools and technologies.

• Integrating platform foundation components, such as workforce data and identity management with collaboration tools and technologies to create the next-generation workforce experience. Here, IT can have a significant role in changing the user experience and transforming business models.

BIG PLAYERS LIKE TO TALK

Enterprise social software is, according to Gartner, most commonly used in organisations with more than 1 000 employees. These organisations are expanding their reach away from simple, small-group usage of wikis and blogs, implementing enterprise-level projects for what Gartner calls social software platforms, communities of practice, expertise location, social tagging and bookmarking. Early adopters have been IT services, national governments and process manufacturing and utilities.

Gartner points to the status of social software as a high-growth market by pointing to its attraction for large vendors such as BEA Systems, Cisco, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and SAP. For example, Microsoft’s SharePoint Services includes social software functionality while IBM’s Lotus Connections software is aimed squarely at bringing everything social networking offers into a business environment, with features such as profiles, communities, blogs, “dogear” bookmark sharing and a mobile collaboration tool.

Virtual Sun shines

At the coalface of exploring the possibilities offered by Web 2.0 technologies, Sun Microsystems has been working on its Virtual Workplace project (also known as “MPK20” after its Menlo Park campus). This is a spin-off from Sun’s broader Virtual Wonderland project. According to Sun, on any given day, more than 50% of its workforce is remote. The company has developed a virtual 3D environment allowing employees to get real-world work done, share documents and meet with colleagues using natural voice communications – just like they do in the physical MPK.

Users are also able to engage in unplanned, informal talk with colleagues. Sun took its cue from the gaming world, using the Darkstar platform to roll-out a 3D environment in which users are able to intuit what’s going on. According to Sun’s website, the vision is to eventually offer the kind of functionality that will allow for the use, editing and sharing of all desktop applications within that virtual world. It is also projected that complementary physical and virtual work spaces will form the next stage in the project.

Sun’s in-house trial can support up to 20 users at a time; the technology has also been tested on university campuses as well as an Italian bank and some insurance companies, indicating its potential for the mainstream. Some interesting features of Sun’s project include:

• Voice Bridge: Sun says this feature, which involves the tight integration of high-fidelity stereo audio, is unique. It allows for live high-quality feeds coming from appropriate directions, simultaneously. Users with lower bandwidth can connect to lower fidelities. Sun has been using Voice Bridge internally since 2004 both as a conference calling capability and as part of its “Meeting Suite” prototype software, which is in ongoing development.

• Porta-Person: This feature allows users to bridge the physical and virtual worlds. The Porta-Person comprises a camera, speakers, microphone and computer on a remote-controlled, rotating platform. Users in the virtual world can remotely-control it, getting a 180-degree panorama view into the real world, from whence those occupants gain a view of a virtual space or conference room.

• Live applications and team rooms: These will dispense with the need for special tools or applications to share work seamlessly via a virtual, permissions-based room containing items such as whiteboards and documents.

SAP imagines new ways to work

SAP is another organisation doing a deal more than dipping a tentative toe into the social networking and collaboration space. In 2005, SAP indicated where it saw the future when it invested in the Socialtext wiki group. Since then, the company has made further inroads through its “Imagineering Unit”, which has spend the past couple of years piloting and tweaking a variety of widgets that can sit on top of its current enterprise offerings, giving enhanced functionality. The potential usefulness of any of the widgets is measured virally – the team don’t push their work, but rather send it out “into the wild”, and see how well received it is.

In addition to the widgets, the unit, which is headed up by its own senior vice-president, is also working with social networks, RSS, SMS, virtual worlds – all across the spectrum of SAP product divisions and used by SAP’s 39 000+ employees globally. SAP’s viral and inhouse method is indicative of a more conservative approach, with timelines of the order of 18 months. The company’s in-house Harmony network (operating behind the company firewall) was initially rolled out only to lab users in America (1700 employees), more than half of whom signed up for it, with over 10% using it daily. Its’ “in vivo” initiative sees SAP codeveloping ideas with customers, who are invited to work with the Imagineering team for six months. During this time, they’re able to share what they learn with their home organisation using collaborative tools such as wikis, blogs and podcasts.

GETTING AS GOOD AS YOU GIVE

The principle of convergence is already well established in the business technology world. We expect things to just work together, work well and drive new ideas and growth areas. Web or Enterprise 2.0 offer those of us charged with getting the most out of the mountain of information we have to work with daily a new way of collaborating and sharing ideas. Few concepts cannot be improved upon by the introduction of a different perspective from a different area of expertise – the growth in the number of organisations seeking to hire “all rounders” capable of filling the seemingly unbreachable gap between technical and business functions goes a long way to demonstrating the value of a broad view. The growth of Web services, software as a service (SaaS) and widgets is driving a new way for developers to meet the demands of business users more easily and on an ad hoc basis, which can make everyone’s life easier.

Security concerns will always be there and should never be discounted, but the reality of our changing workplace is slowly reaching tipping point, meaning that new usage patterns will have to be legislated for. The same goes for a change of heart in the corporate culture department; silo mentalities have, for years, been berated for the inhibitors they so clearly are.

It’s time for business to embrace the change and see the real benefits that come with collaboration and sharing. Take the example of the Linux operating system, which forms an interesting example of what’s possible when one person floats an idea out there with a willingness to stand corrected, appreciate and enact new ideas and embrace changes as offered. Linux is, and continues to be, the product of the work of many diverse and disparate contributors and, for all its detractors, it’s fair to say that, for most distros at least, the end product is unified and business-ready in the function department. Think about what that kind of collaboration could do for your business.