BizTechTalk

6 Months Into Business - Update

Gone Dark? Not Exactly... Shifting Channels

For those who haven't been following me in the world of Twitter in recently (@dankeldsen), while I have not been nearly as active here on BizTechTalk, I've busy with client work, and most recently having the wonderful experience of being with some of the smartest minds I've had the pleasure of interacting with at this week's Front End of Innovation (#feiboston or #fei09) just a 10 minute walk from my office.

I was talking (as you can see in the YouTube clip above) on the topic of Enterprise 2.0 and Innovation, and had a great audience, and incredible and ongoing conversations before, during and after the session.

Full slide deck below - audio coming shortly:

Do You Have the Strength to Embrace Innovation in a 2.0 World?

View more from Dan Keldsen.

The Business of a New Business

And for those who may have forgotten, or indeed, not known, Carl Frappaolo and I have been busy gents in our new (as of December 2008) company, Information Architected.

While the economy could certainly be in far better shape than it is, we have been quite busy with some attention getting SharePoint research, case studies and presentations (free subscription to the information - dripped over 2-3 weeks) out the door starting in January, as well as taking all that we've learned over the 15-25 years we've been doing work in the process, innovation, content, knowledge and search worlds, to provide very targeted educational offerings tied tightly to the consulting capabilities we offer.

Fantastic Clients

For those clients who have seen fit to work with us in the 6 months out of the gate, I sincerely thank you for the work (and would name you, if not for the NDAs, although I understand the reasoning, no worries).

Good to have new clients as well to have circled back to past clients to help continue the work we had begun from the Delphi Group days.

And for those who are in need of no-nonsense analysis, consulting or education services - please don't hesitate to get in touch.

Coming Up

Unless I am on the road, I look forward to seeing people at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference again this year (also a mere 10 minute walk from the office - sometimes being Boston-based is a very good thing), and otherwise, see you online and offline wherever we might next meet.

Don't hesitate to get in touch, and if I can help you at all in YOUR business, let me know, I'd be happy to see if there is a good fit, and if not, the cast of thousands in my LinkedIn and Twitter networks are likely to hold suitable candidates.

Failures of Process (and Thinking) in Social Networking

Oy vey - this is going to be a long post, as the more I dove into it, the more insanity I found...

I've been on LinkedIn essentially forever. It's my favorite professional networking site, and I have easily spent hundreds to thousands of hours on LinkedIn finding interesting people to connect to, or responding to inbound requests. I've slowly built up to around 1500 connections on LinkedIn, and have had some great success with the help of the LinkedIn platform.

All that said, they are by far the slowest moving/innovating platform for social networking, and to make matters worse, the time they spend planning for new features, apparently doesn't allow time to really think things through.

Witness - LinkedIn groups... it's new! and improved! or it will be! maybe...

I received an advance-warning message this week, from LinkedIn:

Dear Dan,

As an active member of LinkedIn Groups, we wanted to let you know about some changes we're putting in place in the coming weeks.

We are in the process of adding new functionality to enhance the experience of Groups, including the recent release of a searchable directory. We are also working with our development teams to bring new tools and widgets to this collaborative space throughout the rest of 2008.

We are also at this time making some changes to the user-created groups we host. These changes include adding a limit to the number of user-created groups any LinkedIn member may be part of at one time. Currently we are setting that limit at membership in 50 (fifty) user-created groups.

You are currently a member of 154 groups. Please take the time before this limit goes into place on August 14, 2008, to choose which groups you would like to maintain. To remove yourself from a group, go to the My Groups page and click the word "Settings" next to the group you wish to leave. At the bottom of the settings page click the text "Leave this group."

We would appreciate it if you would please take this action within the next 10 days. If you would prefer, after 30 days we will automatically keep the first 50 groups that you joined and remove the rest.

If you would like assistance removing yourself from groups, or if you have any other questions, please contact us at http://linkedin.custhelp.com or groups@linkedin.com.

We apologize for the inconvenience this may cause you, but we hope you will continue to find value in LinkedIn and especially enjoy the new functionality of LinkedIn Groups that is coming soon.

Regards,
The LinkedIn team

Keys to call out from the message:

1. New Groups functionality coming this year (they finally added the ability to search for groups - took somewhere around 3 years to add that)
2. They're going to limit people to joining 50 groups maximum.
3. I'm a member of 154 groups, so I'm 104 over the limit.
4. I have 10-30 days to chop down to 50, or they'll chop for me.

My take on this is that they want to scale back the number of groups that people are subscribed to so that when they actually provide the ability to discuss/share (i.e., do anything USEFUL with groups) sometime this year, they don't get killed entirely by scalability problems. Makes sense, although they don't explain it that way. Transparency anyone?

However, look at their recent blog post of July 8th:

We are thrilled to announce the launch of LinkedIn’s Groups Directory on Friday, July 11! With over 90,000 groups on LinkedIn, it was about time to make the complete list easily accessible by our members. The goal with this feature is to make it easier for people to find groups to join, and we think the directory goes a long way toward achieving that goal...

They over over 90,000 groups - which might seem like a lot, but keep in mind that it was nearly impossible to find groups until they added search - it was like stumbling around in the dark and sheer magic coincidence to find a group you might be interested in. And the point of introducing search is? That's right to encourage you to JOIN MORE GROUPS!

Interesting that a month later they're encouraging people to SHED the number of groups that they've joined. Schizophrenia?

Being curious, I take a look at the FAQs for groups, and find that the FAQ still states:

(Text says: You can join as many groups as you belong to. We anticipate that the average user of LinkedIn probably belongs to at least 3 to 4 groups that are meaningful to their professional life.)

That's right folks, belong to as many groups as you like, except that we mean 50 is the limit now, or will be...

And it gets worse...

What's the process like to start bailing out of groups? Certainly not user friendly.

Step 1:
Look at your existing groups - I'd show a screenshot of the 154 groups I belong to, but that would be silly. Here's just the top of the page.

Note that there is no facility to bulk unsubscribe. So it's one at a time.

Step 2:
Jump into a group to start the process of leaving the group.

Step 3:
Ok, find that tiny link in the bottom right, and leave the group.

Step 4:
Log in to your account first

Step 5:
Confirm you want to leave (where is AJAX when you need it?)...

Step 6:
Congratulations, you're done! And where do they put you? Back at the home page, where you are another click and pageload away from getting back to your list of groups again.

I'm no math whiz, but they're expecting me to do this 104 times, and it's 5-6 steps per unsubscribe (if I'm not forced to login every time, it's one less screen and click). So I'm looking at 500+ pages to accomplish what they're asking for. Let's say it's an average of 5 seconds to load each page and click the link or login to get to the next step. That's 2500 seconds, or 41+ minutes of my life if I go non-stop.

Attention users - please do our work for us:
Now I realize I may be subscribed to more groups than most people - but that was one of the most powerful ways to zoom in on people with similar interests on LinkedIn, and given that THERE WAS NO CONVERSATIONAL CAPABILITY (and is that coming? Who knows?), the one and only value to me in being in so many groups is that it essentially bookmarked people for me that might be of interest to meet, partner with, work with, interview, etc..

Now some people have suggested that LinkedIn provide tools to merge/collapse redundant groups, because, whadda ya know, there are many cases where the purposes for groups are almost identical, again because groups where hidden away, unsearchable. Not unheard of for there to be 4-10 alumni groups for the same university for example, due to poor Findability. There's easily 100 innovation-related groups, same for sustainability/green/alternative energy.

LInkedIn's solution there? From their Customer Help area (different area than the FAQ section mind you - sensing any strategic thinking here? Me neither...):

Merging Your Groups

How do I merge my groups?

Due to the member-generated content and the high priority on member's ability to choose which groups they join, we do not offer an automated process for merging groups. For managers of groups that have similar concepts, we recommend contacting the other group manager explaining your goals for combining the groups. If the other manager would like to proceed, you would then choose one group to keep open.Below you will find the step by step instructions we recommend to merge the groups.

1. Identify all duplicate groups you would like to merge.
2. Contact the owners of the groups and determine which group you would like to be the main group.
3. Verify the group name, group logos, and group description for the main group.
4. Export the current member roster of the groups you would like to close.
5. Upload a correctly formatted CSV file to pre-approve members into the main group.
6. Invite all of the members who have been pre-approved to join the main group.
7. Delete duplicate groups by going to My Groups > Manage > Edit Group Info > Deactivate the group. Note: The "Deactivate the group" link can be found at the bottom of the "Edit Group Info" page right underneath the "Save Changes" button.

Note: If you are an official representative of an organization and believe that there are unauthorized groups using your group name or logos, please contact customer service to begin a formal review.

So the long and short of it is that LinkedIn is failing to provide tools to both individual members of groups, as well as to the owners of groups to help solve the limitations they are imposing well after the fact.

And people wonder why I believe usability matters, why thinking through processes matters, why social networking is a more subtle business than you might think, why search is only part of Findability, etc..

It's a miracle LinkedIn has grown to this point - this is another case where things are just broken enough to be annoying, but apparently not broken enough to cause an outright revolt. Same goes for Twitter - except in their case they can't keep the service up and fully functional for more a few days at a time.

I realize this is my Wednesday rant, but is it just me? Who is steering the ship at LinkedIn? Do they test these things with newbies and power users before deciding how to move forward with new features/functionality? What takes so bloody long to provide searchability into a database of your own design? This is just ridiculous - are ex-airline executives in charge, or why is it that the actual users don't seem to enter into the thought process?

(sigh)

Thoughts? I suspect there is going to be a revolt of power-users on LinkedIn, but who knows, I could be wrong. This whole process is so wrong that I can barely find ONE aspect that makes legitimate sense - but off-loading a mess with no adequate tools to make it at least palatable to help them prepare for the next wave is just crazy.

Enterprise 2.0 FTW!

Whew, Carl and I had some fun this morning at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston - and from the limited view we had from the stage (ah, blinding stage lights!), and the laughter (at pretty much the expected spots), I'd say it went over well.

Ran into a ton of people who recognized me from Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, this blog and other social sites - including on my ride in on the train... it's getting to be a really interesting world where the boundaries between the "real" and the "virtual" are awfully blurry (in a good way).

At the moment I don't know where the videos for keynotes are being hosted/posted, so I will instead point you to the presentation itself, in "raw form" (minus our stunning banter). Pop forward to slide 12-13 or so to get into the intelligible "meat" of the presentation. The early portion won't make a whole lot of sense without commentary.

You can view the presentation embedded below, or directly on slideshare.

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Innovation - There's More to it than Crowds

Having spent 2 years diving into innovation and idea management, I know there is more to innovation than getting together in a room once a year and breaking out the post-it notes.

There's also more to innovation than simply asking the crowd to provide ideas, and assuming that all of those ideas are good to great, and executable within a reasonable timeframe, or monetary investment.

Neither of these are bad, they simply aren't sufficient.

Also, having just spent several months analyzing the data that lead to our Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0 which followed on our Market IQ on Content Security - collaboration and sharing of content cannot and should not ALWAYS be out in the open.

Financial Services companies get this - that's why they are prohibited from sharing information across the "chinese firewall" between the research and sales arms - it's called collusion, not collaboration. That's why pharmaceutical companies lock away their R&D - the FDA will tear them apart, as will their competitors, if there are not tight controls on their processes (including collaboration, reporting, etc.). There's a time and place for total transparency, total secrecy, and the gray space in between.

Which is why it's all the more troubling to hear a fellow analyst jump in and declare a decade old market NEW, and a single solution as "the only enterprise class solution" when it hasn't even existed in a production state for 2 years (perhaps not 1, hard to trace from the info I'm finding).

As Dan Farber wrote about the launch of Salesforce's IdeaExchange in 2006:

"Benioff calls it an 'IdeaExchange,' an 'entirely new way to listen to customers on how to build great enterprise software, and satisfy their needs.' What’s entirely new about a blog-like site with comments and voting is somewhat of a mystery..."

That's perhaps a bit harsh, although he has a point. A shiny front-end is only part of the game, which is what troubles me about people who are obsessed with AJAX, widgets, rounded corners and cool company/product names.

In any case, see Jeremiah's "Build your own 'IdeaStorm' with UserVoice" entry, and make your own judgement.

Below is the comment I'd posted on Jeremiah's blog, with live links, and for archive purposes. Presumably the comment will pass moderation and be live on his blog shortly as well. I see that Matt Greeley, CEO of Brightidea is a bit fired up about this as well.

My comments:

The "suggestion box" approach can provide some value, and I'm now trying out UserVoice and IdeaScale as well. Interesting timing in the blogosphere on this one!

A completely open suggestion box, can however have some major downsides - even though I'm a believer in participation, openness and transparency, the stats on innovation show that focus is needed to maximize the value of these efforts.

As @DellDawn suggests, the whole management process itself is significant. Creating the front-end, vote up/down, commentary and status isn't rocket science. Nearly any blog can do that right now with a few widgets to provide ranking, combined with typical commenting and categories/tagging.

Innovation Management and Idea Management imply and end-to-end process, including the idea generation component on through filtering for duplicates, dumb ideas, things that have already been done, as well as genuine useful and relevant ideas that can be taken to market.

And I have to say, Salesforce.com is not nearly the first or the most successful "open innovation" solution.

This entire movement is born out of the Voice of the Customer movement, itself coming from marketing techniques that go back to the earliest days of focus groups. It's just at a different scale - small i innovation (incremental) rather than radical BIG I INNOVATION (brand new, never been seen before).

Some other competitors that have moved beyond the web-enabled open suggestion box: BrightIdea, Imaginatik, and MindMatters. All of which existed well before Salesforce commercialized their solution.

So, I'd say it is patently false to say that "IdeaExchange is the only enterprise class version" of anything. It's a logical extension of the Salesforce platform - pulling data in from the outside (consumers, users), and marrying to their traditional datasource, handled by marketing and sales people and processes feeding in the CRM/SFA engines. Not "the only" by a long shot.

For someone else's thoughts on the open innovation, wisdom of crowds front, see Mark Turrell's recent YouTube video which describes more of the pros/cons of various approaches. He's CEO of Imaginatik, so hardly unbiased, but he's been involved in this type of work for nearly 10 years, and can provide far more detailed anecdotes on the hard results of these systems.

The Forbes article on Suggestion Box 2.0 is a reasonable introduction to this topic as well.

I'll close with the wisdom that venture capitalists know all too well. Ideas are nothing. It's execution that counts. How do you execute on 100, 1,000 or 10,000 submitted ideas? You can't wing it, you need processes and systems in place, or you are toast.

Innovation at the enterprise-level is hard work, even when tapping the crowd. And as Henry Ford said "If I listened to my customers, I would've bred a faster horse." Suggestions frequently (but not always) require interpretation.

Enterprise 2.0 = Knowledge Management 2.0?

Presented a subset of our Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0 findings today at the Boston KM Forum hosted at Bentley. Specifically dived into the Knowledge Management-oriented aspects of Enterprise 2.0.

Not claiming by a far stretch that Enterprise 2.0 is exactly Knowledge Management 2.0 (or vice-versa), but there are some great overlaps. The battery of a dozen profiling questions (a modified version of the KM2 Methodology we've used in the past) that we'd used in the survey popped out a subset of respondents who were "KM Inclined" - and that served as the main data used in this presentation.

If you've already seen our webinar, or read the report, this presentation may be redundant, although the front 2/3rds is new material, setting up the discussion of Enterprise 2.0 in general, Knowledge Management 1.0, and where we seem to be heading.

A fellow was recording the audio, we'll see if I was loud enough to make it worth syncing up and posting - in the meantime, you can probably follow along with what I'm trying to get across, but feel free to let me know if it's clear or mud! (BTW - if you aren't seeing the commenting area, hit me on twitter, and let me know you're having issues. Seems something has gone wrong with Internet Explorer 7 viewers [use Firefox and it's fine - hint hint])

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Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0 - Released! Discuss...

If you have not already downloaded our Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0, hot off the virtual presses this week, I would recommend you grab yourself a free copy. Over 80 pages, over 70 charts/figures, and all in all, quite a bit of information to ponder.

Once you've had a chance to digest the content, pipe up with your comments here, and we can discuss how the >400 person sample population lines up with YOUR reality. Did we find collective intelligence in our survey respondents, or something else?

If you prefer to ask questions "live" then join us tomorrow, Thursday March 27th at 2pm EDT, on the free companion public webinar. Any questions not answered live (in case we run out of time) will be brought back to the blog to be addressed. Over 500 people registered - the more the merrier. Looking forward to it, pipe up one way or another (hither or yon), and let's discuss Enterprise 2.0!

Download it now!

Circling Back to KM - now KM 2.0!

Having so many social network services to chose from, and so many contacts, it's easy to forget who is where, and what they're up to.

Thankfully, although it's annoying at times, most of these services let you know when someone "friends you," "favorites you," or adds you as a contact.

I'm in a deep Knowledge Management (KM) mood recently, probably because as we've been putting together our Practitioner Training on Enterprise 2.0 (almost done), I've been talking quite a bit about KM. And I mean literally talking about it... for days... just me and my laptop as I've been wrapping up recording somewhere around 9 hours of audio. Not quite as much fun as you might think... ;)

So, swimming in the KM waters once again, and SlideShare.net (which I use to embed presentations here from time to time - very handy little service), notifies me that Stan Garfield has added me as a friend.

What a great blast from the past! I'd interviewed Stan last year, on the topic of "Reinvention Prevention" - fantastic interview, and Stan is one well-seasoned guy. He completely understands KM, the issues of incentivization, taking KM out of KM 1.0 and along for the ride with Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0.

If you aren't following his blogging and presentations, well, what are you waiting for?

I'll save you one trip, and have embedded his presentation, Knowledge Management in the Real World, as seen on Slideshare, below (follow the "View" link if the embedded copy doesn't work).

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I knew HP (where Stan leads the Worldwide Knowledge Management program in HP's Services arm) was  advanced in their KM thinking, but had no idea how advanced. As seen in Stan's presentation, they have a n array of tools, to cover the gamut of interactions, knowledge sharing, knowledge seeking, re-use, and more that goes on within the (virtual) walls of HP.

Between HP and IBM, it's quite amazing to see how large professional services organizations can be so nimble. Embarassing even, for most other organizations.

My point, folks, is that if you're sitting on the sidelines, waiting until social networking, blogs, wikis, collaboration, etc. "get real" before you start adopting them. Well, you're already too late! Of course that's never true, but if you don't get started, you will surely never see any value as a result.

More on that next week, when we release our Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0 - but I'll sum it up as this...

You can get moving nearly instantly, and free to pretty low cost (per user) with many of these capabilities. You want integration to existing systems? Well, that will take more work, but still, likely easier than you're expecting (a bonus of the standards that are powering mashups et al).

But, the sooner you start running, the more likely you are to catch up and surpass your competitors who, right now, are more agile, able to recognize new threats and opportunities, and bring their experiences to bear to keep oriented towards the future.

What do YOU think? Is KM alive again? Did it ever die? Is it just a buzzword that refuses to go away?

And for the ~70 people who responded to our Enterprise 2.0 survey saying they'd be interested in participating in a writeup of their case studies, stay tuned, we'll be in touch shortly.

Feel free to prime the pump in comments here though, if you would like to talk about your successes OR failures.

How Many People Does It Take to Make a New Light Bulb?

The World Bank estimates that nearly 2 billion people worldwide live off the grid. One man is on a mission to change that -- Mark Bent leverages the InnoCentive Innovation Marketplace, funded by grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and NY-based VC firm Spencer Trask, to find environmentally friendly, cost effective lighting solutions.

If you're not already aware of InnoCentive, well, you should be. For those who believe that Open Innovation, Crowdcasting, or Crowdsourcing are a big scam, pulling ideas "for free" out of the crowd, and providing all of the profit and benefit purely to the company who has tapped into the crowd, then there is some work we need to do to uncover a bit more of the ways that InnoCentive's model differs from others.

While you're thinking about that, you may want to listen to the interview I had done with Anil Rathi, CEO of IdeaCrossing - they have a different twist on this model as well, this time, putting the brains of MBA students to the test for Innovation Challenges issued by some very well known companies.

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Shh... Secret Webinar on Enterprise 2.0

Ok, so it's not secret, or if it is, we've really blown it, as without our normal week prior push, we have over 300 people pre-registered for the free webinar on Thursday March 27: Enterprise 2.0 - What's the Real Story?

The market is abuzz with commentary on Enterprise 2.0. Emerging from the momentum of Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 presents a unique set of challenges and opportunities. Such as? Ah, that would be telling... you can find a sneak peek in our E-DOC magazine, both in the Jan/Feb issue (current as of this post), and the soon to be published Mar/April issue.

Register for this webinar (no charge, so might as well get this on your calendar) - and stay tuned for the Market IQ report on Enterprise 2.0 that will preceed the webinar (and be the subject of our presentation). The webinar will be archived as well, in case you can't make that day, for you Long Tail fans out there.

Underwritten in part by EMC, Open Text, Socialtext and SpringCM.

 

The market is abuzz with commentary on Enterprise 2.0. Emerging from the momentum of Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 presents a unique set of challenges and opportunities. Such as? Ah, that would be telling... you can find a sneak peek in our E-DOC magazine, both in the Jan/Feb issue (current as of this post), and the soon to be published Mar/April issue.

Register for this webinar (no charge, so might as well get this on your calendar) - and stay tuned for the Market IQ report on Enterprise 2.0 that will preceed the webinar (and be the subject of our presentation). The webinar will be archived as well, in case you can't make that day, for you Long Tail fans out there.

Underwritten in part by EMC, Open Text, Socialtext and SpringCM.

Presentation: Folksonomies and Facets

A blast from the past, slightly dusted off... relates to the previous entry on tagging and social bookmarking, and an enterprise view.

The embedded version can be a bit hard to read, so feel free to jump over to slideshare and view full screen, or download the presentation. It's not the slickest presentation, but I've found it useful in introducing people to these concepts, in the 3 years I've used it, time and again.

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Thoughts? Who's doing (from a user, not supplier, standpoint) enterprise oriented tagging/bookmarking these days?