Interviewing Mark Kurtz at MindTouch, an appliance-based wiki solution provider and Ken Goldman at ideapark, which is an interactive marketing agency, and a customer of MindTouch. Simplicity, innovation, getting work done, flexibility, tools and thinking that allow you to focus on the work rather than the gear that should be supporting you. Fun stuff, and continuing my exploration of wiki-solutions, and 'light-weight' collaboration and content management solutions.
MP3 File
If you prefer to read this conversation, view the full blog entry.
Wikis for Business Collaboration
Dan Keldsen: This is Dan Keldsen from the Delphi Group and also part of the Perot Systems Innovation Lab in Boston, Massachusetts. Today I have on the phone Mark Kurtz who is Vice President of Sales and Marketing from MindTouch which is www.MindTouch.com, and also Ken Goldman, who is principal at IdeaPark Interactive Marketing which is www.IdeaPark.com.
Today we're going to be talking about Wikis for Business Collaboration. MindTouch is a solutions provider in this space and Ken is a customer of MindTouch's. So we're going to do a slightly different format from what I've been doing in the last half a dozen or so podcasts and make sure that it's not just out of the words of a consultant, me, and the words of a supplier, in this case MindTouch, but an actual, honest-to-God user of this technology. You can make sure that we have even more of a reality factor in this one.
Thanks to both of you for joining me on a Friday. It's always good to wrap up the week on hopefully a high note like this.
Mark Kurtz and Ken Goldman: Great.
Dan: Mark, if you would, let's make sure that people have a bit more background on who you are and where you're coming from before we get into the actual discussion about Wikis for Business Collaboration. It would be great if we could get a 30 to 60 second pitch on who you guys are and where you're coming from. So if you could start first, Mark?
Mark: Yeah, sure. Thanks, Dan. Thanks for having us on. MindTouch has been around for over two years providing collaboration solutions for organizations of all sizes; small or medium enterprises up to very, very large enterprises. It's busy solving the problem of having information easy to create, edit, and share on the Web, simply stated.
Our focus is on the business. One of the key beliefs of MindTouch is that the information is extremely valuable, it needs to be controlled on your network, but it still needs to be easy to use.
So in 30 seconds or less that's how we explain MindTouch.
Dan: Great. And Ken, if you would do the same?
Ken: Sure, and thanks for having us on, also. We're IdeaPark. We're based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We are an interactive marketing agency that started in 1994, which is, in Internet years, the dawn of time.
Really, our sole focus is helping our clients communicate on what we call a "brand-to-one" basis with their clients. So at the end of the day it turns into a lot of Web sites and a lot of e-mail campaigns.
But we really feel like that is a pretty broad category, so we're really focusing on this brand-to-one communication. We're really finding a lot of success here based in the middle of the country.
Dan: Yeah, as I said when we were speaking previously, it seems like there are all sorts of things going out of Minneapolis and I would have never guessed.
Ken: Yeah, it's a great place to be.
Dan: Yeah, although it's getting cold. But so be it; that's the way it works.
So, Ken, if we could talk about, obviously you're a customer of MindTouch and I don't honestly know how long you have been using the DekiBox, the solution you're using.
Ken: Mark, have we run six or seven months now?
Mark: That is correct, from when we first launched it (the product).
Ken: It's interesting. Our initial focus with the box was really an internal application, kind of getting it under our belt. Now we're kind of rolling it outside the agency, so it's been nice to take that with them early in their process.
I'm assuming, and Mark you can speak for me, that we're a good fit and that we're not humongous and we can kind of get on the ground here and see it in the field, so to speak. It's pretty easy to get feedback back and forth between the two companies.
Mark: And I think along that line, Dan, is that having various projects going on, and even internally at MindTouch we have this issue with so many different initiatives and how to keep on top of it all.
For somebody like IdeaPark that has such great clients and big clients and making sure they're working efficiently with big organizations and tracking everything, making sure you have the latest document; that's been traditionally pretty hard to do.
With the advent of Wiki technology, especially focused on businesses, making it easy to use, easy to maintain, easy to update, we see companies, like Ken was saying, that start with one particular problem and then they realize that, "Oh, we can also use it for this. Oh, we have remote people and we can use it for this." They can have all their information in a secure location.
Dan: So are the people using this solution always in the office, or do you have remote users?
Ken: We have remote users. Actually, that's interesting because we just took our financial services, for lack of a better phrase, out of house, so we needed a third party to help us with that.
Actually, our MindTouch box has been great for that in terms of them being able to tap into it. Just the other day, in fact, they were setting up new invoicing forms and things like that.
They were like, "Oh, we need your logo," and rather than me going on our server, grabbing the logo, and sending it on an e-mail, I just set them up as a user on the Wiki. There's a category in there that's, I think, IdeaPark Marketing Assets.
I'm like, "Just go in there and grab the logo."
In this particular instance it's a very controlled environment. There are only so many people who have access to it, but as great as e-mail is it's just as bad because stuff is flying all over the place.
It's similar with IM's. It's almost like we have enough to hang ourselves.
It's been great in that sense.
Dan: Right. When we go in to do consulting, it's frequently not the case that people don't have technology. They have boatloads of technology. In many cases most people don't even know that it's there because it's very siloed.
It's great to hear that this has been inserted and then flooded around inside the organization.
What has it done to your e-mail use? Was the goal to minimize e-mail or how did that work out?
Ken: It's not necessarily minimizing e-mail. One thing, and I'm sure, Mark, you can speak to this also, we're trying to minimize files being duplicated. Mark has a good example of this. Especially in the creative services business, "Okay, here's a file. Take a look at it."
Somebody forwards it to somebody else, "Take a look at it." Really simple things like storage on a server and you start talking about people sending files all over the place and resending them and resending them as opposed to just referencing it on the box.
Dan: Right.
Ken: And nobody loses anything and if they tell you they lost it, you say, "No, you didn't; it's on the box," which is a common statement.
Mark: Yeah, I would say one of the biggest pains we've seen in businesses is people getting bogged down in just e-mail.
"Hey, I'm working on this project. Here's the plan."
Maybe somebody is busy for a day and they don't get to comment on it and all of a sudden they're looking at an old version and there are three versions that have been sent around since.
Again, one of our beliefs also is that a lot of these applications, as you said, Dan, they're out there and people don't even know they have them. But e-mail is one of those that is probably not going to go away soon. I hope so.
But are there better ways or smarter ways you can work with it? The way we've approached it at MindTouch is to say, "People can use it for messaging, but when it comes to collaboration, let's allow a one-button publishing, a one-click publishing from your e-mail to your Wiki server."
Like the three of us on this call, we could have a dialogue going on but if we want to open up to other people in an organization, we can capture that one-click automatically onto the MindTouch appliance. It's stored and it's searchable and it gets indexed.
Another thing, it automatically gets backed up, too. If anything were to happen like, "Oh, we had a hard drive fail," or whatever, it can be restored and sent back to the next day.
Ken: I'll have to say that just helped so much. We have, I don't know, seven or eight boxes in our office and then we have co-located servers and they all have different backup things that we have to monitor.
The idea of bringing another box in, there's kind of a cloud or a malaise around that because then I'll have to figure out how that fits in our system. So when we hear, "Oh, yeah, we just take care of that," it's a real simple and nice burden off of our mind. This all comes back to simplicity, which goes back to MindTouch.
There's this whole Web 2.0; do one thing really well; do it simply. The success we see with our clients and our business and our vendors, we're trying to focus that on more of an uber-philosophy. We don't mind cutting things up into pieces and sending them out to people.
Okay, they do that, they do it great, they've simplified it; let's not reinvent that. It's better. It kind of just fits in that whole philosophy.
Dan: Right, okay.
Mark: Ken hit on a key point there. A lot of these software applications in businesses are just totally complex and they get in the way of what you really want to do, and that's manage your business efficiently.
Again, that's one of the key things about using a product like MindTouch. It has to be simple or else people won't use it. They've got too many other things to do. Keeping it simple, simple, simple is absolutely key.
Dan: Right, let it get out of the way. Ken, did you have any other existing content or document management solution for revision control purposes?
Ken: No, not for internal use. No. You know, the challenge with an agency like ours is that we're creative but we're interactive marketing, so we all know something about technology, and we all know probably just a little bit too much.
So we can get by with some bad practices. We have servers, we all know how to get around, so we know a little bit too much and it makes us sloppy and lazy.
One of the ways I like to describe MindTouch is that there's a lot of freedom. It's a Wiki, right? It's wide open, but there are guard rails. And that's just the concept of Wiki in general. Yeah, it's out there but there are enough rails on it so it kind of keeps a check on it and keeps it in control.
Mark: That's actually a good way to describe it, Ken, because people think of Wikis as being these wide open spaces or flat, etc.
Dan: It's for crazy people. [Laughter]
Mark: Yeah. The guard rails we put in include hierarchies. People understand taxonomies. We're now encountering businesses that have said, "Our file server is too cumbersome or we have stuff that we just store on FTP sites, but that's too hard. We want something that's a WYSIWYG editor but also gives us the structure that we need in order to find it."
You can put it in taxonomies that make sense and then it's indexed so you can pull a search on it later if you come up with an idea in a brainstorming meeting. I know IdeaPark comes up with some great concepts. They might execute on a campaign and six months down the road they'll say, "Boy, you know, back in December we had that really good idea. Maybe we can reuse that for this next component."
And it's easy to find and also within the context of how that idea came into play such as, was this part of a different theme? Was it part of the brand-to-one communication? I like that, Ken, by the way. I'm going to start using that. I'll just make sure I attribute it to you guys.
[Laughter]
Dan: Is there a logo for it?
Mark: There will be by the end of the day. [Laughter] There's just so much as we have more people come on board, getting up to speed instantly is one of the advantages we have because all of the information is there; they can search on.
Ken: Mark, as you were referencing that, you know, "Oh, we had that idea way back in May," in my mind I had this vision of going to a certain e-mail application software that shall remain nameless and doing an advance search and thinking, "Is that archived," and blah, blah, blah, and "Where are the archives because I have to archive that information because files get too big."
It was just giving me a shiver down my spine. And just, hopefully, I know where everything is. That scenario you're talking about, that's not the case, so I don't have to go digging through.
Dan: Right, that's interesting.
Now have you done any retroactive archiving of things, sort of pre-MindTouch? Or has it been sort of put in place and moving forward?
Ken: Fortunately, I can say we haven't had time to do that, because we've been really busy. But it's actually a great idea because we still have stuff sitting there from years back in different kinds of places. That sounds like a project for an intern.
Mark: Actually, Dan brings up a good point because we have a lot of business customers that will say, "Hey, can we bring over information from our file servers so it's searchable and archived and put within relative taxonomies."
Or, "We had this other Wiki product which, again, shall remain nameless. We need to bring it to an open standards base. We store everything in XML, so it will be easy for other applications to search and find and discover information."
Those are some of the directions that MindTouch has moving forward, because otherwise you end up with these, for lack of a better term, Wiki silos all over the place and that becomes dangerous as well. If it's not in an open standards format you're in trouble. That's why everything we have is in open standards.
Dan: Right, so it's like Wiki weeds. Normally I talk about that sort of thing as Kudzu, if you're familiar with the story. And if you aren't, Kudzu; Google it and it's a pretty fascinating story about Kudzu.
It's like the early days of Web sites or Internets or extranets. I mean, they proliferated and they were usually completely disconnected and unmanaged.
Mark: Even going from mainframes to client server technology. The promise of AS400s and UNIX machines; you had stovepipes all over the place.
It's now the Web 2.0 version of it and we want to make sure that doesn't happen.
Dan: Yeah, exactly. The 2 doesn't stand for a multiplier.
Ken: No. [Laughter]
Dan: As a brief tangent and then we should probably wrap it up so we can continue working and wrap up the week here, I'm kind of intrigued about something here... We just had an event last week, the Business and Process Innovation Summit (www.bpis2006.com), and I happened to sit in on a session that was on Innovation in Marketing.
A little more explanation of the brand-to-one concept would be interesting to me and hopefully to the people listening to this.
Ken: Well, you know, we find that a lot of times in interactive marketing, it's interesting how things have changed over the years in terms of where that lives on our clients, in their worlds.
With every one of our clients it's a different scenario. But what we try to do is ideally never have it siloed. We're always collaborating with other agencies with our clients.
There are some specific roles that e-mail and Web play and they're complementary roles. Our goal is to create Web sites that attract new customers and when we get to the brand-to-one piece, we're trying to get as much information about them so that when we reconnect with them via e-mail we're nurturing that relationship.
So we're sending e-mails there almost all the time now. We're delivering dynamic content. We use tools, so if I know you, for instance, are interested in a certain kind of food and your family is a certain size; let's say you're empty-nesters. You might be interested in dinners for fewer people around the table.
So I can deliver one e-mail where you get that specific content, while Mark, on the other hand, might have a young family. So it's literally the same e-mail but in certain areas that e-mail was shoving dynamic content. "Shoving" is a horrible word.
Dan: Perhaps "providing" instead?
Ken: Providing, thank you. So what we're trying to do is really take that to the next level. Yeah, we're sending things en mass. I mean, if we are collecting our data right on the front end, which is usually through the Web site, we can really deliver specific information.
All of the ones and zeros are there. It's just a matter of putting them together in an elegant fashion. I'm not sure that's what you're asking for.
Dan: That's fine. That's the direction I was thinking you might be talking about, but it's worth finding out.
So is it about more automation in marketing, then?
Ken: You know, the backend, yeah, that's where it's there. But we feel, and I'm sure some people will cringe when I say this, we feel like that's much more of a commodity; that the value is really in the strategy, the thinking, and the user experience design up front.
In the automation, we use a lot of third parties for the automation. We don't want to reinvent the wheel and we have great partners who help us with that.
It's really the up-front strategy and creative execution that we feel puts it to the next level.
Mark: And just on that as well, Dan, I think that comes across what Ken's describing in this age of so much information, brand is really everything.
We talk about it all the time for our clients even though we're doing technology. You've got to be consistent in everything you do because everything contributes to your brand.
And having that available in one place is, if you want to say, "What's our latest logo?" This IdeaPark, what's the tag line? What is their two-sentence description? What's their two-paragraph description? Every touch is going to promote your brand and for the brand of your customers.
Ken: Again, with us experience equals brand. You have a brand whether you want one or not, and the experiences our clients have with us contribute to our brand.
So using tools like MindTouch, etc., and how do we communicate with each other and consistency, etc., it all rolls into the same thing. We have to practice what we preach.
Dan: Right. Okay. Interesting. I follow probably too many things than is, in the end, really healthy for me. But that's just the way I've been built, so what can you do?
I was at a conference a couple weeks ago, the User Interface 11 Conference, Jared Spool's thing, which I finally got to experience even thought I've lived in the Boston area since 1988. I had plenty of opportunities but it just never worked out.
I happened to sit in on a day-long session on Persuasion Architecture, and I did a little blog entry about that shortly after that. I was sufficiently impressed to actually blog about it, which is hard to do when I'm flying all over the place.
But that fits right in line with what those folks were talking about, and this is the sort of thing we do as well… although not on the marketing front. The strategy side is far more important - before you buy a solution of any kind or hire somebody to solve something, you need to know what it is you're trying to solve and what it would mean to solve it. The idea of metrics or some goal in mind other than, "Make this thing go away or appear," or whatever the scenario is.
I was kind of exhausted at the end of the day because it actually made some of the work that we do, which we do around Taxonomy and Information Architecture, look like a total walk in the park. Most people are astonished at the amount of work that we're asking them to do just for that. [Laugher]
This is like five, ten, twenty times as much, but the ultimate payoff is exactly the sort of thing that you're talking about; where you can actually do sort of "personalized mass communication." To not have to have entirely unique content for every point of contact, but enough that it continues the conversation.
Dan: So there's interesting stuff going on in marketing these days.
Mark: Yeah, it's a great place to be. We feel like the people in our office, we could pick them up and bring them into any medium and do good work. This is the medium we choose. We feel like this is the place to be.
As we were joking earlier, we think this Web thing is going to stick around.
[Laughter]
Dan: Maybe.
Mark: Another interesting trend we're seeing as well on the marketing side is this user generated content. Look at all the big deals that are happening right now like YouTube and MySpace. It's all based on users providing content and again, Wikis enabled that both in public spaces as well as within corporations.
How are you going to leverage that? How does it help and how does it hurt your brand? Companies need to be aware of that. It's a difficult thing to address right now, it's so prevalent.
Dan: Sure. We've been following enterprise content management and Web content management for as long as it's existed, basically, and that's much more about control and narrowing participation than opening it up.
It's interesting to see, and that's part of the reason that I try to pay attention to a wide range of things. I think that there's a huge value to keep your eyes as wide open as possible.
Some of the big old ECM players actually understand this and they're starting to adopt it, but clearly, this is, in the words of Clayton Christiansen, "This is a disruptive force that's coming up."
It might be eating their lunch and their dinner and everything much sooner than they ever expected, if they ever expected it at all. As far as I'm concerned, that's a great thing because things don't need to be expensive and complex and with needless overhead. It's a tool in the end, and if it helps you then great.
Ken: Yeah, absolutely.
Dan: Great!
Well, I think that's a pretty good note to end it on. Thanks again for your time today.
Ken: Sure thing; thanks for having us.
Mark: Appreciate it.
Dan: Just to wrap it up once again, this is Dan Keldsen one more time. And we have on the phone today Mark Kurtz who is V.P. of Sales and Marketing with MindTouch, which is www.MindTouch.com, and Ken Goldman, principal at IdeaPark Interactive Marketing which is www.IdeaPark.com.
And the subject for today was, mostly, Wikis for Business Collaboration. Thanks a lot!
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