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.

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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Test Drive our Enterprise 2.0 Training

By this point, most readers of this blog have probably had a chance to download if not digest the 90 page Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0 that we published at the end of March 2008.

If not, please go grab a copy (provided free via the generosity of the underwriters of the Enterprise 2.0 research project) - and then pop back here for further Enterprise 2.0 resources.

Back? Great. Good to have you back (and those who never left, thanks for humoring me).

If charts and analysis were good but not enough for you, and you're looking for further information to drive interest and adoption for Enterprise 2.0 in your own organization, take a Test Drive of our Enterprise 2.0 Training.

The content was created by my colleague Carl Frappaolo and myself, with the input of our advisory panel, the data and analysis of our research in Q1 2008, and the many years of training and consulting that we have done on topics such as Knowledge Management, Enterprise Portals, Content Management, Enterprise Search, Business Process Management, and more.

What is the Course?

The new Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) Certificate program provides students with an understanding of industry best practices and existing and emerging technologies for Enterprise 2.0.

Course attendees receive access to supporting online courses and exams, and are awarded the AIIM E2.0 Practitioner, Specialist and Master designation after passing the online exams (and case study for Master candidates).

Students learn about the evolution and definition of Enterprise 2.0 technologies; frameworks and concepts; worker models for Enterprise 2.0; risk and control vs. collaboration and innovation; assessing organizational readiness; and best practices for implementing Enterprise 2.0.

AIIM has classes scheduled across North America and provides online courses for attendees’ convenience. For more information about the AIIM training program, visit www.aiim.org/training.

Enough of the Marketing - How Do You Get the Free Test Drive of the Enterprise 2.0 Practitioner Training Program?

You may test one of the online training modules of this new training program by using the campaign code X3B4C below your login on the AIIM website.

Go to www.aiim.org/Education/CourseDetail.aspx?courseid=226 select "Enroll Now,"  then log in (if you've already download the Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0 for example) or create a new profile where indicated and, enter the campaign code - X3B4C to drop your your price to zero, complete the "purchase," and you'll receive and e-mail with your login information.

E2.0 Practitioner Certificate Program has the following modules:
  1. How to Position Enterprise 2.0 in Relationship to IM, BI, KM and Web 2.0
  2. Enterprise 2.0 Techniques
  3. Enterprise 2.0 Frameworks and Concepts
  4. Business Drivers for Enterprise 2.0
  5. Worker Model for Enterprise 2.0
  6. Evolution and Definition of Enterprise 2.0 Technologies - Enterprise 1.0
  7. Evolution and Definition of Enterprise 2.0 Technologies - Enterprise 1.5
  8. Evolution and Definition of Enterprise 2.0 Technologies - Enterprise 2.0
  9. Overview of Enterprise 2.0 Extensions
10. State of the Enterprise 2.0 Market

Your free test drive is for E2.0 Practitioner Program Module 5: Worker Model for Enterprise 2.0. Please contact training@aiim.org if you have any questions or to learn more about the full course.

I would love to hear your feedback here as well. Have at it!

If you are in Boston for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, our training department has a booth at the show where you can get even more information about our training offerings in person, and Carl and I will be around to discuss the training, our research, or any other aspect of Enterprise 2.0 that you might want to discuss.

The Long Tail of Presentations (Be Findable!)

I've posted my presentations from time to time here on my blog, and typically hosted (in the end) at slideshare.net.

Although I've been a reader/viewer of presentations on slideshare.net for some time, I only began posting presentation to the site 7 months ago.

Why is that?

There were many reasons why I believed this was worth a bit of experimentation:

1. For content that I've already shared publicly already, this is a good central location for me to refer people to. Any time I present now, I simply point people to slideshare.net/dan.keldsen and away they go. Solves the problem of conferences or other events that do not have a presentation sharing location, and even if they do, provides the ability for people to see what else I'm yammering about (context and discovery is awfully handy).
2. Experimentation with "2.0" tech, and the ability to easily share/embed content, in my blog, YOUR blog, or anywhere else - makes it that much easier to get even more life out of my presentations. Re-usability and broad distribution is a great benefit of where we are in the state of the web these days. Simple standards and mechanisms win out over complexity every time. Please, feel free to refer to my presentation as you like - simply attribute appropriately, and link back to the slideshare repository (or wherever I've posted it).
3. If I'm sharing information already, for example a presentation I gave 6 months ago in Denmark entitled "Who's the Boss, MOSS?"- I'd be willing to bet that the majority of people on the planet didn't make it to that presentation. So why not open the information to a much larger audience? There were perhaps 50-75 people in the room - yet on slideshare, 1861 views have totaled up since I'd posted it the day of the presentation. That's a nice magnification of the audience - and in this case, that "Long Tail" is one heck of bigger audience than I'd had at my disposal in the live audience.
4. Like many of the other things I do, blogging and podcasting for example, you don't have to take my word for it that I know what I'm talking about - you can go and experience it for yourself. So rather than reading what I have to say about myself on a resume (or LinkedIn) about my experience and expertise (and I try to be as truthful and upfront as possible, but nobody is perfect - and as Seth Godin says "All Marketers are Liars" - see video of Seth on this topic)

There are many more reasons, and I'd love to hear what others are finding as either useful or useLESS about such a resource. There is almost no downside to posting your presentations - as long as they are meant to be public at all, the broader reach you can gain, the more usefulness that content will have to you and your potential customers, next potential employer, existing customers, etc..

And to simply whack you over the head with my point, and tie this to our current research - the Market IQ on Findability (due out in June, pre-register for the public webinar) - you can't FIND what isn't available in some findable form.

You may have some brilliant presentations sitting on your desktop/laptop - but unless it's out there, somewhere, in a format that allows it to be searched or otherwise navigated to, nobody will ever know about it. As I said in a somewhat controversial post recently, ideas are nothing - it's executing on them that's the trick. Take it another step, and even execution on the idea isn't enough. If you have a 100 MPG car that's in production, but nobody knows it exists, then you may as well not have bothered, as the end effect is ZERO. That's marketing, folks, and it applies both for the outside world (to consumers or other businesses) as well as internally to your organization (making people aware of what you can do as an employee).

Search isn't magic - and this business of the "Long Tail" which has gotten considerable hype since Chris Anderson's article in Wired and expanded missives in the book released in 2006 is not just applicable to consumer-facing services, and specifically about SELLING.

Much of the content that should be powering your organization is stuck in silos (such as your inbox) which might be of incredible value within your organization. And merely lamenting that information is in your organization, and going about in recreating a sales proposal, a PowerPoint presentation, or pursuing a line of research isn't just a bad idea, it is a huge waste of the existing resources of your organization.

Re-invention/re-creation is a tax on your organization that isn't adequately accounted for by typical financial accounting methods. Findability plays a key role in breaking that cycle - take a listen to a podcast interview I had done with Stan Garfield a year ago on "Reinvention Prevention" - which discusses this issue of findability for knowledge and innovation purposes.

To wrap it up - we've closed the survey for the Market IQ on Findability, stay tuned for the final report, and please feel free to pre-register yourself for the free public webinar where we'll be discussing the findings.

In the meantime - what is YOUR personal experience in the "Long Tail" - whether as a consumer (the "traditional" sense of the Long Tail), or within your enterprise? Are your colleagues understanding this? Is this a reason that gets people to contribute their content into a content management system, wiki, blog, etc.? Has it had any affect at all? Would love to hear how people are thinking and acting around this type of thinking.

Comment away!

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.

Wanted - YOU! Vote on Topics Coming Up in Next 12-18 Months

To those who provided input on the Findability questions recently - thank you for the extra eyes and brains in helping us to round out the focus for the survey. The extra 10-20 vendors added to the list was very  handy. Survey is coming real soon... stay tuned.

Now, looking for more feedback (ala Open Innovation, Wisdom of Crowds, Crowdcasting, etc..) as to what we should be covering, topically, moving forward.

We've already delivered two Market IQs, one on Enterprise 2.0 (>900 downloads in the last month), Content Security (>1300 downloads), and are now embarking on Findability (survey launching within 24 hours).

What else should we be covering in the next 12-18 months?

Infinitely easier for you (and you, over there in the corner) to simply weigh in and vote on what you'd like us to cover. See the "micropoll" below, and feel free to invite others to provide their opinion as well.

Content, Information, Knowledge, Process - what can we provide that would help you and your organization?

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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Visualizations: TweetClouds

Sam Lawrence (CMO for Jive Software, blogging at GoBigAlways), and a number of others on the twittersphere, have been producing visualizations (using "tag cloud" styling) around the "tweets" (maximum 140 character messages posted/sent on twitter.com) of themselves and other high-traffic twitter users.

Sam had been favoring the use of IBM's Many Eyes offering, which provides many ways to visualize information, but requires uploading of content to the service, for it to then chew on. The problem of that service was that the "easy" way to get information out of twitter and into Many Eyes involved cutting and pasting page after page of twitter text.

Noticed yesterday that Stowe Boyd gave tweetclouds.com a whirl, and while I had to hit the site multiple times (timed out, must be overloaded) for it to eventually load my twitter feed (pulled automatically, no cut and paste), it popped out the visualization below.

You can see the impact of the aggregation I'm doing by piping in various lifestreams (my listening habits in iTunes for example) and workstreams (posts to my blog) into my twitter account (via twitterfeed.com). There is also of course the bulk of twitter messages, which are manual tweets from me, responding to various people on twitter, posting open questions, etc..

Sadly this visualization doesn't do two word analysis, or it would be more obvious that "enterprise" and "2.0" are nearly always tied together in my tweets around "enterprise 2.0."

Interested in what anyone else thinks believes this visualization reveals about my twitter activities - too self-promoting? Too broad, too narrow?

aiimALERT: InsideView Brings the Outside In

InsideView recently introduced the concept of "Socialprise" as a framework for understanding the way in which the unstructured data of social networks and media are influencing enterprises. A newly announced product, SalesView, is specifically designed to mash-up social data with search and intelligence capabilities to help sales teams automate prospecting, accelerate sales cycles and close more deals. (see http://www.insideview.com/cat-company-press.html for more details)

InsideView are essentially a meta-meta-aggregator of relationship and social data, which can be used to infuse/enrich Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, or be used as a stand-alone tool similar in some respects to ZoomInfo (one of their underlying data sources) or other "relationship/contact databases" such as Hoover's.

What does InsideView bring to the table? It helps to provide salespeople and marketers further informaiton to understand their prey, customers and prospects beyond the bare minimum information (such as name, phone, e-mail, company name, title) they might otherwise have to work with in their CRM or Sales Force Automation (SFA) systems.

They are a meta-meta-aggregator in the sense that they are aggregating (collecting) information from multiple sources, and that their underlying data sources can also be aggregating information from multiple sources (such as ZoomInfo). This extends the reach and richness of the information that they are able to pull back on behalf of users of their system, in a similar fashion to the functionality of federated search or universal search in more traditional enterprise search.

In an ideal world, or at least with the smarter salespeople and marketers, such information will help to weed out who the appropriate people are to engage in more targeted discussions, and to engage in informed conversations of the "2.0 age" rather than in continuing to hammer out cold-calls and blanket, un-personalized (or badly personalized) mass-marketing.

The various sources that they tap for this information are a mix of both typical structured data sources as well as in crawling and pulling in unstructured information that would contain social/relationship information (such as from blogs, Facebook etc.). InsideView has a wide range of paid and free sources that they aggregate and examine to algorithmically determine the relevancy and accuracy of this information. Factors would include such things as: the recency of updated information, determining whether the self-owned and updated sources (such as profiles on LinkedIn and Facebook) are more accurate than automated information collected via subscription service, and so on.

Between the acquisitions of SRD via IBM (in 2005), Interface Software by Lexis Nexis (in 2004), and Contact Networks now part of Thomson West (as of January 2008), this aspect of social networking or social intelligence/relationship intelligence is adding serious firepower for internal enterprise users.

I've been talking about just this sort of "relationship enrichment" or "relationship intelligence" since 2003/2004. When I was with Delphi Group, we began rolling this functionality into the world of "Information Intelligence" as a higher-level topic, with several conferences discussing the mashup of business intelligence, dashboards, search, knowledge management, portals, and more, into a "meta layer" that could unify all of the mess of siloed content/information/data/knowledge underneath. In 2008 we might be more tempted to simply call all of this Enterprise 2.0 (see our Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0).

Further food for thought: See my "Death of a Salesman?" article from 2004 (on Scribd), and March 2008 presentation on "Build Smarter Internal and External Communities" (on slideshare.net) - both of these relate to the enterprise use of social networking.

Social networking is not purely about person-to-person connections, or in providing a virtual watercooler (or virtual voyeur perhaps) view into your "friends" (peers, co-workers, etc.) but also for the ability of participants IN the network to use the data within that network to become smarter in the ways that they interact with the people in that network.

This would provide both the ability to build communities explicitly for the sake of building a community, as well as in using that community as a source of "intelligence" to provide deeper insights into the community as a whole (collective intelligence or "the wisdom of crowds"), as well as the individuals themselves.

All of this latent "social information" is buried in the heap of individual silos both inside and outside of the control of any one corporate, even deeper than "normal" (spreadsheets, reports, PDFs, etc.) electronic information is. Sadly, most organizations have only just recently begun to understand the value of their more explicit "information assets" (even the value of intellectual property in the form of patents are not well understood in many organizations) and the idea of including social/relationship intelligence as a valued asset is well behind that train in the majority of cases I've come across.

There is a giant opportunity here, and for myself, I'm looking forward to the day when we can turn around say "How in the world did we even function without the ability to tap our relationship intelligence?" The early adopters for this type of functionality may easily run away with marketshare, if their competitors stay asleep too long.

Where will you and your organization be on the adoption curve?

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!