Archive for the ‘Web 2.0’ Category

Facebook for the Enterprise

Monday, December 18th, 2006

It is totally amazing how large corporations “engulf” 1000s of employees; minimal existence as an employee id or an e-mail address, contributing from a small cubicle in a functional department. I was talking to a few people over at my day-job — these are the people who have at least 100+ connections on LinkedIn. A lot of these connections are also from the work buddies. When I asked them about connections at work beyond the 1st-degree, very few existed.
Doesn’t it make sense to have connections beyond 1st degree at work, except for the ones coming through the bosses? More than that, doesn’t it makes sense to ‘show and tell’ the life at work and beyond work? One of the challenges within the enterprise is finding people who could do the job, but managers hire external consultants, spend time and money on external recruiting efforts to get it done.
A Facebook for the enterprise could be the answer. People would know what you do, who do you interact with and projects you are working on.
Sure, this would raise the “heckles” of the management, even more of the immediate managers — They would be worried as ever, thwarting further moves allowing employees to promote the brand YOU. What the heck, You have been successful in establishing 100s of connections on LinkedIn, have been writing a blog which the recruiters are reading and have been posting videos on YouTube and have made friends across the atlantic.
What a typical implementation of a Enterprise Facebook would have?
1. A Profile Page
2. A Project Page
3. A Friends Page
4. A Message Page
5. A Musings/Moods/Notes Page
6. A Groups Page
Organizations are pathetic in having Groups for intra-company discussions. Think about it. Knowledge is not contained in a department — it cuts across functional boundaries.
However, don’t do the following if you want the Enterprise Facebook to succeed:
1. Do not have implicit connections between manager and the employee. Have a “boss connection” only if the employee chooses to do so (Great HR exercise here to figure out the bosses who are disliked!)
2. Do not let this project ever, ever be run by HR
3. Do not moderate the content. People within the firewall are more responsible than outside
And yeah, if your Enterprise Facebook experiment becomes successful, open it up outside the corporate firewall and hand over an alumni account to every departing employee.
Doing the above, might improve your rankings by couple of notches in Fortune’s Most Admired Companies.
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Enterprise Tagging: How Sales & Marketing can exchange information

Friday, November 24th, 2006

Tagging on the internet has allowed discovery of information from individual blog posts, to stories, to stock tickers, to photos, all of which has given rise to Folksonomy. Large corporations have Marketing departments spend millions of dollars in marketing material which never get shared with the sales department — event if they do, it’s after spending tonnes of money in building/buying some proprietary software to automate the process.

The reality is:
* Marketing is global, so are sales
* Marketing material is produced by different teams viz. marcom, product marketing, channel marketing, event people, etc. etc.
* Sales department sits in their own silo — esp. in large organization, Marketing material never reaches sales, even if it does, either it’s not timely or not in it’s entirety or maybe after spending thousands of dollars for a software to properly tag the proprietary meta-data
* Meta-data is a moving target — If a system is used for storing the attributes in an RDBMS — any change in meta-data either renders the content undiscoverable or leaves it with incorrect attributes.

Come tagging to the rescue, being flexible, tags can be defined on the go — however good idea to have some high-level tags; as in product names, business units, etc. The second level tags could be platforms, customer names, companies, etc. How the information can be exchanged? Marketing runs a blog with the single objective of exchanging information with sales (in this case say marketing collateral). Every post is tagged with the product the collateral belongs to, the second level tags being platform, industry vertical, target audience, etc. etc. Sales can receive this information by either subscribing to the feeds or by searching for the tags on the blogs. WordPress supports category level feeds.

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Enterprise Tagging: How Sales & Marketing can exchange information

Friday, November 24th, 2006

Tagging on the internet has allowed discovery of information from individual blog posts, to stories, to stock tickers, to photos, all of which has given rise to Folksonomy. Large corporations have Marketing departments spend millions of dollars in marketing material which never get shared with the sales department — event if they do, it’s after spending tonnes of money in building/buying some proprietary software to automate the process.
The reality is:
* Marketing is global, so are sales
* Marketing material is produced by different teams viz. marcom, product marketing, channel marketing, event people, etc. etc.
* Sales department sits in their own silo — esp. in large organization, Marketing material never reaches sales, even if it does, either it’s not timely or not in it’s entirety or maybe after spending thousands of dollars for a software to properly tag the proprietary meta-data
* Meta-data is a moving target — If a system is used for storing the attributes in an RDBMS — any change in meta-data either renders the content undiscoverable or leaves it with incorrect attributes.
Come tagging to the rescue, being flexible, tags can be defined on the go — however good idea to have some high-level tags; as in product names, business units, etc. The second level tags could be platforms, customer names, companies, etc. How the information can be exchanged? Marketing runs a blog with the single objective of exchanging information with sales (in this case say marketing collateral). Every post is tagged with the product the collateral belongs to, the second level tags being platform, industry vertical, target audience, etc. etc. Sales can receive this information by either subscribing to the feeds or by searching for the tags on the blogs. WordPress supports category level feeds.
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Web Applications with Portable Data: The next generation of Web applications

Tuesday, November 7th, 2006

Data portability is a big issue. None of us want to get locked down with a particular vendor. All the free web apps like GMail, JotSpot, Writely, et al come with a price — your data is in a proprietary data store. If you are not using pop3 and want to migrate from GMail to some other cool new email application, then there is no easy way out. The vendors rely on the lock-in of this data. For example, Google is offering E-mail services for SMB — what if you grow into a larger enterprise tomorrow and wanna have your own e-mail environment. There is no easy migration. Same goes for other next generation hosted applications like spreadsheets, wikis, office application. For a long time vendors rallied against Microsoft for proprietary formats — Talk about this one!
What’s the solution then? As Fred Wilson mentions:

I think anyone who provides a web app should give users options for where the data gets stored. The default option should always be to store the data on the web app provider’s servers. Most people will choose that option because they don’t care enough about this issue to do anything else.

I think we need a new breed of web applications which have pluggable storage. For example, all you get from a next generation GMail is a presentation and business logic layer. You get an ability to choose your data storage. It should work the way other desktop based applications work — You photo organizing software does not have data store attached to it, all it has a tonnes of logic and uses the file system. You can switch to another application and take care of the business.

Why the Hiring Process sucks and How Writable Intranet can fix it

Friday, August 4th, 2006

One of the biggest roadblocks in hiring process is (absence of) collaboration. Again, email and word documents are used for accepting resumes, screening, providing feedback and managing the queue, prioritization, etc. There are multiple parties involved for a single job opening viz. Hiring Manager, Recruiter, HR Manager, HR Specialist (the lady who schedules the interviews!), the interview team, Hiring Manager’s boss, etc.
All the parties involved use e-mail and word documents buried in e-mail to gather feedback and collect data points, which sucks big time. It’s a pain managing the approval process, why a candidate is good on resume, who was phone-screened and rejected/approved. This whole workflow is a mess in most large and small companies. There are vendors however who have software/services for automating this; some are focused on resume management, others are geared towards candidate management, while others specialize in managing the job descriptions. A good software costs at least $200K-$500K in TCO, including license fees, software costs, hardware costs, people costs, training, etc. On top of that, in my experience, HR is last in the queue to get IT support to create an infrastructure to manage the workflow.
What’s needed bare minimum is a collaboration tool for the Hiring Managers where they can track resumes, annotate them as needed and capture feedback from the interview team. I think the Writable Intranet in the form of Wikis could be a great platform. Here are some ideas:

  1. Create a centralized Wiki run/managed by the HR department.
  2. Each page on the Wiki corresponds to a an open position within an organization. As the pool of resumes comes in, the resumes are attached as a file and an entry is made as a section for each candidate. The interview team provides individual feedback by entering their feedback directly into the Wiki under the candidate’s section. Thus all the data gets collected in one single place and is visible to everybody
  3. Security issues? The major thing is reducing visibilty to other people who are not part of the hiring process for a job; depends on the policy as well. Turning off “special pages” and features like “Random Pages” would prevent people from accidentally jumping onto a page.

Easy?

Writable Intranet

Monday, July 10th, 2006

“Writable Intranet” is the corporate intranet of the future where employees collaborate using Wikis, Blogs and applications interoperate using RSS. The Writable Intranet does not have series of static pages where information is disseminated “top down”. It is the place where employees collaborate, exchange thoughts, create plans, capture meeting notes, track projects, create documents (not word documents but documents which are web pages and have version control). The Writable Intranet marks the end of e-mail as the collaboration platform. The Writable Intranet means that enterprise knowledge is “free” and searchable by anybody. The “freedom” implies that knowledge is neither in e-mails and nor in documents but in easily accessible and searchable repositories. The Writable Intranet means information which is a constant source of data to other people who make modifications at will.

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Collaboration in the Intranet: The existing ways are fundamentally flawed

Saturday, July 1st, 2006

Fundamentally flawed? Ye, right. Do you remember that the last document you created for your project plan is in the folder //HD4567Share/CorpDocuments/Plan/? Worse, an updated copy of the document is in Sue’s e-mail. Even worse, Sally has updated with her 2 cents and uploaded it on Notes. Go figure!
Mostly collaboration within the intranet is built on top of two technologies viz. e-mail and documents (and documents within your e-mail). Most communication around e-mail is 1:1 or 1:Many or Many:Many, everybody keeps adding their “stuff” on top of the original thread with corrections, clarifications, modifications to the original. A way too many times you have to scroll/wade through to figure out which is the most important e-mail with the most up-to-date/accurate content. And then that e-mail gets archived in one of the “folders” somewhere. Imagine a discussion on a Sales strategy or a Marketing plan. Yeah, you may have had face-to-face meetings, but the little oh-so-forgotten meeting minutes are still in e-mail. Imagine looking for the outcome of such a meeting 6 months down the road — It would be an exercise in vain.
Why this mess? Two-fold, collaboration platforms are draconian and proprietary. Wrote in word, can’t edit in HTML, your word document in e-mail is outdated the moment someone opens up and hits save. Using e-mail as the default publishing mechanism and document repository is killing the organizational knowledge. My exchanges with a former colleague are now in my mailbox. Good or bad, my boss doesn’t event know what ideas we exchanged for that product roadmap! Organizations are not to be blamed for this, there was no one-click publish platform to enable collaboration and knowledge exchange before e-mail. The over reliance is troublesome. Bob Sutor suggests PDF is good until no one wants to edit the document. Not bad, but how about few people collaboratively editing a document before it is published to a larger audience. We’re not there yet, at least not without paying a large fortune.
Come Wikis, Blogs, RSS, JotSpot and other platform. Don’t get this wrong, MediaWiki, the defacto Wiki platform and most of the other wikis still store the content in a data store which is not tuned for harvesting, publishing using other
tools except MediaWiki — All presentable content on Wikis are still HTML. The challenge as David Berlind puts it is “interoperability” of proprietary applications, their protocols. It’s the “walled” systems for content management, document management and e-mail management which are guarding collaboration. David points out that RSS alone can rescue us there:

With RSS as both the notification mechanism and the content subscription mechanism, you basically have a single technology that takes e-mail, e-mail attachments, and far too many round-trips (of email, to fully facilitate the collaboration) completely out of the equation.

Wikis by themselves have the power to change the way corporate intranets disseminate and share knowledge. It’s not a surprise it is easier to find a place to host a webpage and edit it’s content (or maybe even run a Wiki) on the public internet. Have you ever tried hosting a page in your intranet, if you were successful; how easy it was? Even if there are a few companies listening, the future of “Writable Intranet” is here. What I fear most? The whole story of Wikis, Blogs, etc. getting diluted by vendors like Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, InterWoven, etc. by claiming that “yeah, we also do Wikis, Blogs, RSS” and then locking that information down in their proprietary store (a la import all formats but export none!). Keeping a close tab on this one.
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Cartoon Poking Fun at TechCrunch 53,651

Wednesday, June 28th, 2006

Josh Kopelman has a very interesting post (more than a month old) called 53,651. This is the number of feed subscribers (as of 5/12/06, when Josh authored the post) to Mike Arrington’s Tech Crunch blog. Right now the number is 79,175!
If something gets reviewed, the site gets Tech Crunch’ed and gets easy 10-15 thousand subscribers who jump on it to try that “thing” out. These users then slowly fade away in oblivion and become irrelevant. However, it has become very important for any Web 2.0 “startup” or initiative to be Tech Crunch’ed to get noticed in front of investors, employees, future partners, etc. Here’s my take on it (illustrations by Ali):

Mike is waiting for yet another Web2.0 company…
…and the 800 or so Web2.0 startups vying to get their share of beta-users from TechCrunch feed-base

Web 2.0: What’s in a name?

Tuesday, June 13th, 2006

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet.”
–From Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)
I finally managed to catch-up on the tail-end of the brouhaha which started during the long weekend a few weeks ago over the Web 2.0 copyright issue.
Tim’s reply was right in it’s own right. Tom Raftery has a right to be upset too. The crux of the matter — bloggers and geeks have high expectations from O’Reilly media, the sanity of which was restored to a certain extent after Tim’s response. Moreover, the way people waited for Tim to respond was equivalent to union workers only willing to talk to senior executives of a company and nobody else. Funny, isn’t it? Where is the collective intelligence?
Reading the whole chatter looked like viewing a chain of private e-mail traffic, acerbic at times. Can’t really make a judgment why the blogosphere (nice name!) was created?

Web2.0: Symantec CTO validates spending and surge

Sunday, May 14th, 2006

In a keynote at Symantec’s annual user conference, Ajei Gopal presented some key data points to validate the impending surge in tech spending. According to him, the IT sector as a whole is on the brink of a major innovation and spending cycle. He also presented a chart showing the IT-investments-to-GDP ratio growth overlaid with the advancements in computing and echoed the unabated progress in hardware; commoditization of memory, disk, CPU devices have reduced the prices by factor of thousands with net increase in ROI.
ajei_1.jpg
If this is an indicator of change, we are also seeing spurt in funding activity which is a strong supplementing signal.
This is also changing the rules of entrepreneurship and the startup culture, with incubators like “Y Combinator” seeding companies for as little as $6,000 while trying to replicate the success of Flickr and del.icio.us (both got acquired by Yahoo); wherein Google is saying that the whole valley is the research lab and then acquiring companies for a little change.
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