Personal InfoCloud

Past Attendees have Said...

“A few hours and a few hundred dollar saved us tens of thousands, if not well into six figures dollars of value through improving our understanding” (Global insurance company intranet director)

From an in-house workshop…
“We are only an hour in, can we stop? We need to get many more people here to hear this as we have been on the wrong path as an organization” (National consumer service provider)

“Can you let us know when you give this again as we need our [big consulting firm] here, they need to hear that this is the path and focus we need” (Fortune 100 company senior manager for collaboration platforms)

“In the last 15 minutes what you walked us through helped us understand a problem we have had for 2 years and a provided manner to think about it in a way we can finally move forward and solve it” (CEO social tool product company)

Is the Workshop Only for Designers?

No, the workshop is aimed at a broad audience. The focus of the workshop gets beyond the tools’ features and functionality to provide understanding of the other elements that make a giant difference in adoption, use, and value derived by people using and the system owners.

The workshop is for user experience designers (information architects, interaction designers, social interaction designers, etc.), developers, product managers, buyers, implementers, and those with social tools running already running.

Not Only for Enterprise

This workshop with address problems for designing social tools for much better adoption in the enterprise (in-house use in business, government, & non-profit), but web facing social tools.

The Workshop will Address…

Designing for social comfort requires understanding how people interact in a non-mediated environment and what realities that we know from that understanding must we include in our design and development for use and adoption of our digital social tools if we want optimal adoption and use.

• Tools do not need to be constrained by accepting the 1-9-90 myth.
• Understanding the social build order and how to use that to identify gaps that need design solutions
• Social comfort as a key component
• Matrix of Perception to better understanding who the use types are and how deeply the use the tool so to build to their needs and delivering much greater value for them, which leads to improved use and adoption
• Using the for elements for enterprise social tool success (as well as web facing) to better understand where and how to focus understanding gaps and needs for improvement.
• Ways user experience design can be implemented to increase adoption, use, and value
• How social design needs are different from Web 2.0 and what Web 2.0 could improve with this understanding

More info...

For more information and registration to to Viget Lab's Social Design for the Enterprise page.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Overview

The last couple of years I have had many conversations with a broad selection of mid-sized to large organizations. Some of these are customers of mine or potential customers while others are conversations I have had, but all having the similar discussion about social tools in the enterprise. What follows is a collection of snippets from those conversations regarding Microsoft SharePoint 2007, most are not publicly attributed as they were not intended to be “on the record”.

One common element from all of the discussions is the frustration nearly all of these organization have with their experience with Microsoft SharePoint 2007. The comments are based on those spending one month to a year with the tool (the six month to one year club with tools offer best insight).

SharePoint does some things rather well, but it is not a great tool (or even passable tool) for broad social interaction inside enterprise related to the focus of Enterprise 2.0. SharePoint works well for organization prescribed groups that live in hierarchies and are focussed on strict processes and defined sign-offs. Most organization have a need for a tool that does what SharePoint does well.

This older, prescribed category of enterprise tool needs is where we have been in the past, but this is not where organizations are moving to and trying to get to with Enterprise 2.0 mindsets and tools. The new approach is toward embracing the shift toward horizontal organizations, open sharing, self-organizing groups around subjects that matter to individuals as well as the organization. These new approaches are filling gaps that have long existed and need resolution.

Broad Footprint

What SharePoint 2007 Does Well

Microsoft SharePoint 2007 seems to be in every enterprise I talk to, at least somewhere. It is used if a variety of different ways. When SharePoint is included with addition of Microsoft Office Online (MOSS) is a helpful addition for simple use of these older prescribed methods. MOSS is also good at finalizing documents that are the result of a collective, to group, to collaboration knowledge work process. MOSS and SharePoint are not great at anything but the last step of formalizing the document for distribution in another workflow.

A recent report from AIIM that was written-up by CMS Wire in “Study Finds SharePoint Primarily Used for File Sharing” states “47% use it primarily for file sharing (and/or as an internal Portal 47%)”.

How Did We Get Here?

There is one common point I have heard with nearly every company I have talked with over the last couple years, MS SharePoint 2007 is nearly ubiquitous in deployment. Nearly every organization has deployed SharePoint in some form or another. Many organization have tested it or have only deployed pieces of it. The AIIM survey reported by CMS Wire states: “83% currently use, or planning to use, SharePoint”.

Organizations either sent their IT out for training on SharePoint 2007 and/or brought in consultants to help build an implementation that fit their requirements. Most of the requirements IT departments started with were rather thinly informed, as they have nearly all stated after using SharePoint for a month, most realize after six months or so, their requirements are vastly different than what their initial requirements were, as they have learned more deeply about social tools in the enterprise.

Many who deployed SharePoint, thought it was going to be the bridge that delivered Enterprise 2.0 and a solid platform for social tools in the enterprise is summed up statement, “We went from 5 silos in our organization to hundreds in a month after deploying SharePoint”. They continue, “There is great information being shared and flowing into the system, but we don’t know it exists, nor can we easily share it, nor do much of anything with that information.” I heard this from an organization about 2 years ago in a private meeting and have been hearing near similar statements since. This is completely counter to the Enterprise 2.0 hopes and wishes they had for SharePoint. They were of the mindset that open sharing & having the organization and individuals benefit from a social platform.

MS Marketing’s Promise

The Microsoft marketing people seem to have performed their usual, extend what the product can do to the edges of its capabilities (and occasionally beyond) to map to customer stated desires. In 2006 and 2007 the advent of social computing on the web (Web 2.0) had entered the hormone raging stage gathering attention in boardrooms and IT departments who had been playing around with the ideas of bringing these tools inside the firewall in an official manner. The desire for social software to be part of the enterprise was an interest and desire.

The Microsoft marketing materials they focus on “collaboration and social computing”, which is more of a document management and workflow process tool that they put the more fashionable moniker on. But, it is this Microsoft marketing that engendered many organizations to the idea of the value and promise of social computing inside the firewall and Enterprise 2.0. Microsoft’s marketing legitimized the marketplace, but in typical Microsoft form did not exactly deliver on the promise of marketing.

Part of the promise of SharePoint is a malleable platform, which many developers who work across platforms complain is one of the least malleable and easy to develop on platforms. There are many constraints built into SharePoint and developers for SharePoint are not cheap. Development cycles for SharePoint as said to be about one third to half longer than most other options. At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference this past Summer in Boston, Lockheed Martin had a session demonstrating what they had built on top of SharePoint and it was quite impressive. But when asked about costs and resources, they said: “It took about one year, 40 FTE, and 1 to 5 million U. S. dollars. Very few organizations have those type of resources with availability to take on that task.

What Microsoft marketing did well was sell the value that social tools bring into the enterprise. They put the ideas in the minds of those building requirements (at a minimum to be included in pilot programs) as well as the values derived from using this new generation of social software inside an organization.

Multiple Micro-silos

At various conferences, across many industries, I have spoken at I have been asked to sit in on the SharePoint sessions, which turn into something like group therapy sessions (akin to group therapy in the first Bob Newhart show). There is much frustration and anger being shared as people try to resolve how to share information between groups and easily merge and openly share information once it has been vetted. These groups consistently talk about going directly to their Microsoft support & SharePoint Experts with these problems only to be told it is doable, but far from easy and may break some other things. Finding relevant information or even the inkling that something is happening in some group is nearly impossible. The promise of setting up ad hoc open groups by employees across silos is nearly impossible with out getting authorization.

Information Locked

One of the largest complaints is the information is locked in SharePoint micro-silos and it is nearly impossible to easily reuse that information and share it. Not only is the information difficult to get at by people desiring to collaborate outside the group or across groups, but it is not easily unlocked so that it can benefit from found in search. The Microsoft SharePoint model is one that starts with things locked down (focussed on hierarchies) then opens up, but unlocking is nowhere near as easy a task as it should be.

SharePoint Roadmap Marginalized Over Time

Where do people turn that have gone down the SharePoint route? Well most start by adding solid functionality they had thought SharePoint was going to provide or wished it had. SharePoint has acknowledged some of this weaknesses and has embraced outside vendors that make far superior products to plugin as components.

Some common social tool plug-ins to SharePoint are Socialtext, Atlassian Confluence, and Connectbeam (among with many others). Then there are those who build on top of Sharepoint, like Telligent and News Gator Social Sites. While others are more prone to full platforms that deliver much of the functionality out of the box, like Jive Clearspace.

Plug-ins Extending Functionality to SharePoint

Microsoft makes great promises, or hints at them in its marketing materials for SharePoint along the lines of social software in the enterprise. The first step many organizations take with SharePoint after realizing it does not easily, or even with an abundance of effort, do the expected social software components is to start getting solid proven services and start plugging them in. Many tool makers have taken their great products an made it quite easy to plug them into the SharePoint platform. Want a great wiki tool, not the horrible wiki “template”, then Confluence or Socialtext is added. Need a great social tagging/bookmarking tool that ties into search (this starts enabling finding the good information in SharePoint’s micro-silos), then Connectbeam is added.

This list goes on with what can be plugged-in to Sharepoint to extend it into being something it hints strongly it is quite capable of doing. What one ends up with is a quite capable solution, but built on top of one of the more pricy enterprise platforms. In most cases the cost of all the plug-ins together is less than the cost of SharePoint. It is from this point that many organizations realize all of these add-ins work wonderfully with out SharePoint (however, getting all of them to work together as easy plug-ins to each other is not always easy).

Full-Suites On Top of SharePoint

Another option that organizations take is to move in the direction of putting a fully functional social platform on top of SharePoint. Tools like Telligent and NewsGator Social Sites. These are options for those who find value in what SharePoint offers and does well (but and therefore getting rid of it is not an option), but want ease of development and a lower cost of development than is the norm for SharePoint. These full-suites also provide the ease of not having to deal with working through plugging together various different best of bread solutions (this really reminds me of the path content management systems went down, which was less than optimal).

Not only is the Lockheed Martin example of building on top of SharePoint an example of expense of that platform, but the recent AIIM survey surfaces high cost of development as a rather common understanding:

“Another area of interest is the required effort to customize SharePoint and integration other third-party solutions. In this case, 50% of survey respondents indicated custom solutions required more effort than expected (33% “somewhat more” and 17% “much more”). The integration challenges focused on a lack of training/documentation and integration with non-Microsoft based repositories and existing applications.” From CMS Wire: Study Finds SharePoint Primarily Used for File Sharing.

Fully Replacing SharePoint

There is a third option I have been running into the last year or less, which is removing SharePoint from the organization completely. I know of two extremely large organizations that are removing SharePoint from their organization this year (once these organizations are public with this I can be). The reasoning is cost and under performing as a social platform and what is does well is easily replaced with other solutions as well. In one instance I know the people who brought in SharePoint are being let go as well as the whole team of developers supporting it. I am hearing business operations looking into having their IT department find something that is meets their needs and were promised by IT that SharePoint was that solution. This was echoed by Lee Bryant via Twitter [http://twitter.com/leebryant/status/1099413469]: “[…]problem is many IT depts just don’t care - it is a simple ‘solution’ for them, not their users”

When removing SharePoint some organizations are going the piece by piece approach and stitching together best of breed or are going the route of full-service social platform, like Jive Clearspace. The cost per users of such solutions is less, the time to install to up-and-running fully is reportedly a about a third and maintenance staffing is also reportedly lower.

SharePoint is not Enterprise 2.0

What is clear out of all of this is SharePoint has value, but it is not a viable platform to be considered for when thinking of enterprise 2.0. SharePoint only is viable as a cog of a much larger implementation with higher costs.

It is also very clear Microsoft’s marketing is to be commended for seeding the enterprise world of the value of social software platform in the enterprise and the real value it can bring. Ironically, or maybe true to form, Microsoft’s product does not live up to their marketing, but it has helped to greatly enhance the marketplace for products that actually do live up to the hype and deliver even more value.

Why LinkedIn Needs to Have a Better Grasp of Social

A heavy user of LinkedIn, I have been hearing identical complaints to my own as regular business networking event conversation fodder for the last six months or more. Light users of LinkedIn as well as those of us who have over 600 connections have nearly identical problems.

At its core the social interactions design is severely flawed and poorly thought through. LinkedIn integrates social interaction components and features as if they were playing a game of "me too" with Facebook. This is problematic as much of the Facebook social interaction design is poorly executed. I have stated how Facebook's DNA does not support business use (in Facebook for Business or LinkedIn Gets More Valuable. Oddly, now LinkedIn seems to be building the poorly thought-through Facebook interactions, implementations which are directly counter to their reason for being.

Wake-up LinkedIn! You may have money to get you through some sort of recession that lasts for a while, but your business relevance requires you to get these things right and get them correct now.

Too Many New Features, Too Fast

LinkedIn now has conflict and confusion about its primary focus as a service and what is the primary social object. Prior to 18 months ago LinkedIn was more or less a live resume and work connections site. The social object was the individual person and the focus was clear and social actions, while limited, were clear and focussed too. The addition of more social interaction and services has completely lost that sense of focus and could be one of the causes of poorly built social tools.

The last 18 months or so has LinkedIn seeming like it wants to be more of a Social communication site,  workplace social platform, and/or  general social site like Facebook with a quasi-focus around work-life.The lack of central understanding of what LinkedIn is also has increased the scatter shot understanding of social and voice (based on really confounding contexts for understanding). The inclusion of social elements that bleed into LinkedIn, with similarities to Facebook, are executing on the same social understanding of social interaction design that acts as if the last 8 to 15 years in digital social interaction design and knowledge did not exist.

This is a compilation of things that have been increasingly bothering me with the rollout of LinkedIn's social features. They seem to roll out features that are not fully baked. Then, they release new features rather than fixing the poorly thought through functionality already deployed. I have delayed writing this as I have heard many of these items were going to get fixed (but have not after far too long). I also have many friends at LinkedIn and have not wanted to rock their boat (but many of them have publicly and privately encouraged me to write this publicly).

Another reason for posting this is I am seeing these mistakes many places. Far too many "social x gurus" are just users of less than optimal systems. They don't grasp the less-than-optimal features are holding back the tool adoption, in addition to a lack of social interaction design.

This muddled social mess triggered Jonathan S. Knoll to proclaim on Twitter, "LinkedIn: the online community of people you don't really like."

What Worked Well

LinkedIn worked well for me as an ambient social network for business contacts. The last 3 or 4 years LinkedIn has been one tab that was always open in my work browser (until a couple weeks ago when I got fed up). I would watch the ambient flow of who changed jobs, titles, connections, and what they were seeking. These were social business clues that I used as opportunities to reconnect with people and see where I could help out.

LinkedIn was a great tool for strengthening business relationships. Quite often I would offer help to someone job seeking or send congratulations on new role or job. The communications often lead to chatting about working together, which had a really good business upside for me.

Watching people connect has value in finding people I already knew and had not connected with, as well as having some understanding of who outside a community is looking for help (those who say they can tell everything about a person by who they connect to don't understand social interaction dynamics very well, particularly around business relationships and business growth).

LinkedIn's recommendation services for finding others to connect with have been really good. The only other service that is this strong in my opinion is Plaxo, which is a service that increasingly has taken the place of LinkedIn for me. Plaxo understands volume, various levels of relationship, and keeping contact information current where you need it (in address books, not is disconnected services). LinkedIn is also really good for capturing and making recommendations of one's work.

Something LinkedIn has done rather well is its iPhone application, which really should be extended to other mobile platforms for smart phones. It finally enabled the ability to use contact information in a use context that matters and outside their service (mail does some of this but it is broken as in LinkedIn responses and external responses are not coordinated).

LinkedIn's question and answers section has been done rather well. Many people find it valuable and get good use from it. There are many things that could be done to augment it, particularly around using it to build an understanding of reputation around subject matter. It also could use the ability to easily hold on to (and annotate for one’s self) good suggested answers. This is the sign of a decently thought-through social platform.

The second part to this post, LinkedIn: Social Interaction Design Lessons Learned (not to follow) - 2 of 2 looks at some specific lessons learned from LinkedIn.

Social Tools Are Great Aids for Change

Stewart Mader brought this to mind again in his post Onboarding: getting your new employees cleared for takeoff, which focusses on using wikis (he works for Atlassian and has been a strong proponent of wikis for years and has a great book on Wiki Patterns) as a means to share and update the information that is needed for transitions and the joining of two organizations.

I really like his write-up and have been pushing the social tools approach for a few years. The wiki is one means of gathering and sharing information. It is a good match with social bookmarking, which allows organizations that are coming together have their people find and tag things in their own context and perspective. This provides finding common objects that exist, but also sharing and learning what things are called from the different perspectives.

Communication Build Common Ground

Communication is a key cornerstone to any organization working with, merging with, or becoming a part of another. Communication needs common ground and social bookmarking that allows for all context and perspectives to be captured is essential to making this a success.

This is something I have presented on and provided advice in the past and really think and have seen that social tools are essentials in these times of transition. It is really rewarding when I see this working as I have been through organization mergers, going public, and major transitions in the days before these tools existed. I can not imaging thinking of transitioning with out these tools and service today. I have talked to many organizations after the fact that wished they had social bookmarking, blogs, and wikis to find and annotate items, provide the means to get messages out efficiently (e-mail is becoming a poor means of sharing valuable information), and working toward common understanding.

One large pain point in mergers and other transitions is the cultural change that brings new terms, new processes, new workflow, and disruption to patterns of understanding that became natural to the people in the organization. The ability to map what something was called and the way it was done to what it is now called and the new processes and flows is essential to success. This is exactly what the social tools provide. Social bookmarking is great for capturing terms, context, and perspectives and providing the ability to refind these new items using prior understanding with low cognitive costs. Blogs help communicate people's understanding as they are going through the process as well as explain the way forward. Wikis help map these individual elements that have been collectively provided and pull them together in one central understanding (while still pointing out to the various individual contributions to hold on to that context) in a collaborative (working together with one common goal) environment.

Increasing Speed and Lowering Cost of Transition

Another attribute of the social tools is the speed and cost at which the information is shared, identified, and aggregated. In the past the large consulting firms and the slow and expensive models for working were have been the common way forward for these times of change. Seeing social tools along with a few smart and nimble experts on solid deployments and social engagement will see similar results in days and a handful of weeks compared to many weeks and months of expensive change management plodding. The key is the people in the organizations know their concerns and needs, while providing them the tools to map their understanding and finding information and objects empowers the individuals while giving them knowledge and the means to share with others. This also helps the individuals grasp that are essential to the success and speed to the change. Most people resent being pushed and prodded into change and new environments, giving them the tools to understand and guide their own change management is incredibly helpful. This decreases the time for transition (for processes and emotionally) while also keeping the costs lower.

Selective Sociality of Villages

The piece that resonated along similar threads to Robert's post is Susan Mernit's "Twitter & Friend Feed: The Pleasure of Permissions". Susan's post brings to light the value of knowing who you are sharing information with and likes the private or permission-based options that both Twitter and FriendFeed offer. This selective sociality as known Local InfoCloud of people and resources that are trusted and known, which we use as resources. In this case it is not only those with whom we listen to and query, but those with whom we share. This knowing who somebody is (to some degree) adds comfort, which is very much like Robert Patterson and Luis Suarez#039; villages where people know each other and there is a lot of transparency. Having pockets where our social armor is down and we can be free to share and participate in our lives with others we know and are familiar to us is valuable.

I am found these two pieces quite comforting as they reflect much of what I see in the physical community around me as well as the work environments I interact with of clients and collaborators. The one social web service I have kept rather private is Twitter and I really want to know who someone is before I will accept them as a connection. This has given me much freedom to share silly (down right stupid - in a humorous way) observations and statements. This is something I hear from other adults around kids playgrounds and practices of having more select social interactions on line in the services and really wanting to connect with people whom they share interests and most often have known (or followed/listened to) for sometime before formally connecting. Most often these people want to connect with the same people on various services they are trying out, based on recommendation (and often are leaving a service as their friends are no longer there or the service does not meet their needs) of people whom they trust. This is the core of the masses who have access and are not early adopters, but have some comfort with the web and computers and likely make up 80 to 90 percent of web users.

Social Tools and Services

To start this tutorial the understanding of the object that is central to social interaction need to be understood. Often in digital social environments there is a social object that is at the core of the discussion (see Jyri Engestrom's post on Karin Cetina Knorr's "object mediated sociality", which he brings to the web an understanding of social objects). These social objects form the frame of focus for discussion and social interaction, be it a photo in Flickr or a post in a person's blog that is being discussed in the comments or tagged, annotated, or blogged about in another post, much of the social web is built upon social objects or the creation of sociality around objects. These social objects are the focus of this discussion as it is the focus of the discussion and annotation that is being brought into focus here.

Collective

I am starting with the collective understanding. The collective as seen in the first graphic has three layers: 1) the object being discussed; 2) the discussion or annotation of or about the object; 3) the people annotating or discussing the object. The object is the focus of collective, the individual's voices and annotations are held separate as each individual is working as an individual. The individuals annotations and contributions can be aggregated or collected (a helpful connection is the collective is based on collecting) and surfaced as an aggregate. This aggregate is what allows folksonomy, as it surfaced in del.icio.us providing understanding how many people use a single tag term on an object. But, this same approach in folksonomy helps discern slight or vast differences between understanding around an object. We can see what an object may be commonly by many in a folksonomy, but we can also see differences in perspective and context.

The deep and rich value in tagging from a folksonomy perspective is created in the collective structure of tagging with the individual voices held separate around the understanding of the individual. The ability for anybody and everybody to tag and annotate and object and have their perspective captured is a very strong value for each individual who has hopes of refinding the object in their own perspective and context, as well as having others whom have similar understanding find the same object. Lacking the understanding of collective approach is lacking the understanding of folksonomy and leave incredible value out of a service as the depth and breadth of understanding supports the human collective mind as it exists.

Collaborative

The collaborative understanding has value as it allows for capturing consensus and usually aims at completeness. The collaborative approach has individuals contributing understanding of their perspective of an object, but it done so with everybody working together to build one understanding (often a comprehensive understanding), but often with the aim of the work building the understanding out of one voice capturing many perspectives. The depth and of understanding is flattened - if the object is a picture of a sunset, once it is annotated as being a sunset there is no value in many others making the same statement. Quite often a wiki page on a subject is used as an example of a collaborative effort.

Social bookmarking can be collaborative when a group is working to capture all objects on a subject matter and annotate them, but this is rare occurrence. There is a need for this when organizations are doing competitive analysis of other organizations work on a subject matter and the aim is to be as exhaustive as possible. Often the competitive exercises are done in selective social spaces that are closed to all but members of the group doing the work.

In the past I have describe Flickr as a narrow folksonomy, which is a rough synonym for collaborative tagging. There is value missing in Flickr tagging (I am always hopeful they will add the collective individual tagging into Flickr as I see great value to the service and the individuals who are tagging other people's photos by being able to tag a photo of a sunset as a sunset, which would all the person tagging to have a nice collection of things they call sunset as well as reinforce it is about a sunset). Flickr does allow for this type of tagging to a degree, but only provides access to the tags by API (Flickr has had many other things on their plate that the community has placed higher priority on). But, the collaborative tagging approach is often copied from Flickr by services that do not have the massive user contribution, which provides Flickr to do insanely brilliant algorithmic understanding of what is in their service (like interestingness and clustering).

The understanding of collaboration has trickled out of business and academic understanding of most anything social in an organization being categorized as being collaborative. The aim in the 1990s was for business and organizations to use digital collaboration tools to let people to work together across distance and to capture understanding. At this point most of what was being done was collaborative, with the focus on building one document or deliverable (marketing report and sale projections, etc.). Many of the tools that business used and the academic community in information science studied were tools that were trying to foster collaboration or a collaborative knowledge with in the organization.

Tools Improved and Collaborative and Collective Tools Evolved

Today we have grown well beyond the relatively poor tool foisted upon unsuspecting employees as knowledge management tools with the wonderful goal of capturing and sharing knowledge (often through complex tools that created excuses for adding new required form fields) [I have lived through the implementation and non-use of many of these painful KM tools, which did market what is now capable and far less painful in the tools of today]. Today people wanting to hold on to information or a media object can easily bookmark the object in their social bookmarking tool from their own perspective to greatly ease refinding the object later, as well as share that object with others who are near in thought or have similar interests. This collective approach is still being incorrectly called collective through habit of calling anything social collaborative even though the tools that are now delivering on the promise of the last 15 years (which the tools of the past damaged the hope that proper tools could work).

Those building tools and implementing tools (I am looking squarely at you large consulting firms who use the old models to mis-understand, provide poor strategy, and improperly implement tools that should work well) must expand their vocabulary and understanding by one term and add collective to their lovely term (when used properly) collaborative.

Social Bookmarking has Great Value in the Enterprise

Every organization needs to know itself better then they currently do. The employees and members of the organization are all trying to do their job better and smarter. The need to connect people inside an organization with others with similar interest, contexts, and perceptions is really needed. I am a huge fan of social bookmarking tools to help along these lines as it helps people hold on to information they have need, want, or have interest in (particularly with future uses) and put things in their own context and perception. Once people understand the value they derive from using the tools to hold on to information out of their vast flow and streams of information and data that run before them each day they quickly "get it". As people also share these bookmarks in the organization with their tags and annotations, they also realize quickly they are becoming a valuable conduit to helping others find information and they grasp the value they will derive from being a resource that adds value in the organization. Other people derive value from information in the organization and outside it being augmented with individual perspectives and context. When this is pair with search, as Connectbeam does with their social search that pairs with existing FAST, Google Search Appliance, and others in-house search engines, the value the whole organization receives is far beyond the cost and minimal effort people are putting into the tools to get smarter, by more easily holding on and sharing what they know.

Nearly every attendee to the workshops I have put on around this subject quickly realizes they undervalued the impact and capability of social bookmarking (as well as other social computing tools) in the enterprise. The also provides a strong foundation for better understanding social computing to increase the derived value for all parties (individuals, collective users, collaborative users, and the organization).

Is is time for your enterprise to get smarter and provide more value inside and out?