Personal InfoCloud

The Problem with Social (the Term)

I deeply agree with the core problem of the use of the term social and its resonance inside businesses. The problem with social has a few facets to it, but using collaboration is just as if not more problematic.

The pairing of Social with enterprise or business is a bit redundant, as business by its nature is social with meetings, interactions, and communications at the core of what a company does to provide its products and/or services. Business is also social in how it interacts with its customers and potential customers. What has been problematic over the years (many tens of years) is technology has been less than optimal in mapping to how humans are social into technologies, which inhibits optimal social interactions inside and outside an organization. Communication and the efficiency of around this focal point is essential to understand and optimize around.

This often leads me to use social software, social tools, or social computing as a means to distinguish the tools that better map to how humans, in their life and work, need to interact with others. These optimized tools and services with lower levels of friction most often lead to greater efficiency. Distinguishing between tools and services that get in the way of eking out tacit knowledge to ones that ease this activity is essential, particularly in how it is shared, found, and used in the practice of an organization.

Having done this mapping, I usually find leaving social out of the rest of the conversation. Focusing on technology pain points and the inefficiencies inherent in many of the normal enterprise tools for communications and group interactions is where the focus belongs and how these newer classes of tools and services help resolve these problems.

Putting business (or enterprise) and social in close proximity is not only redundant, but rather lacking in insight into how businesses think of the term social at their core (normally the upper management and finance areas). The term social business is used within some circles of economics and finance as a euphemism for those industry segments often related with escorts and prostitution. Other understanding of the pairing of social enterprise, is in Europe with ethical and green policies as in the Social Enterprise Alliance, As well, the definition of social business in Wikipedia, as of 14 December 2009 states, "A social business is a non-loss, non-dividend company designed to address a social objective." All of these reinforce the use of social known connotations of social in business, which have very different intent than the discussion within the context of enterprise 2.0.

The solutions all of these energy is being put toward is not solving problems with business being social, but business tools and services they use as inhibiting the social interactions that are needed to most efficiently exist and survive. While not optimal, social software and social computing are rarely put into the contexts that just social or social business/enterprise conger up. Keeping understanding on a straight path and communications flowing as intended it is good to be clear and understand what what terms bring up. Many if not most organizations are currently looking into or deploying social business and/or social enterprise initiative along the lines of the Grameen Bank and reducing carbon footprint connotations these terms have been connected to in many recent years.

Collaboration as a Fuzzy Term

The second large problem is collaboration, which is equally if not more problematic. Collaboration is often a used a broad lazy term for any things were people work, interact, or share information. Denning and Yaholkovsky in regularly point out the severe problems with the broad use of the term collaboration and often focus on the term "real collaboration" to bring the focus of collaboration back to the original concept of people working together to accomplish a common goal and for a unified result, as in artist collaborating on creating a statue (not many versions, but one). I know you, Andrew, grasp this really well.

Over and over I see many organizations buying "collaboration" tools with out sorting out what sort of group or shared activity problem they are trying to solve or the type of services/tools that are needed to fill the gap. Often the collaboration tool is not matched to the problem space and need, which then needs framing the various types of interactions, collections, sharing, curating, co-creation, etc. that are there. The types of tools, interaction design, and solutions are different for each type of activity and one size does not fit all (I am continually amazed how foreign this is to many).

What do we call it? That is a tough problem as many of the terms are not precise and/or come with much baggage. Currently, we do not have a term with currency that fits the need perfectly.

Real Value

Having a fascination with economics and the “pure flow of information...” mantra I highly value information and the tools and services that provide the value chain of data, information, and knowledge. These digital tools were not the easiest things to work with for many people and it has always been a passion to have the tools and services work better. More optimally, so people could have better access to information so to help them make smarter decisions around things that matter(should we find a new supplier, do we have a problem, do I need a coat, does our packaging need to be weather resistant, etc.).

What matters and what is work and what is personal is a very blurry line, but having the information and ease to access it so we are smarter in making decisions it the key. It comes down to efficiency, which is highly related to ease of use.

Real Populations

What fascinates me most with inside the firewall and always has is the need to understand how people use (can’t use) the tools that have been built or deployed for their use. Things that are seemingly logical and intuitive from the developer and designer’s viewpoints are not on target with those in the organizations. When I started working managing, maintaining, building, and improving the tools and services people use it was inside the firewall as the web did not exist yet and the internet was still in its nascent stages, even if it had been around for 20 years already.

The groups of people I working with needed to use these tools and services to perform their job as the paper and non-technical means of performing their tasks were replaced by computers or were never possible with out the power of digital computations. What was true then with dealing with the populations of co-workers and others inside an organization using the the tools and services is still true now, success of a product is measured by its percentage of use from those who must use it, efficiencies gained, lack of bugs, and improved time to complete tasks.

Web projects seemed to lose these values as it was easy (relatively) to get a few thousand, hundred thousand, or few million (over time) using a product or service. But, those services were only a small slice of the population, even a small slice of the population who needed a service like the one being offered.

Real Social

In the last five to eight years or so that truth around small slices of the populations using tools and services is never more relevant than around the flood of interest in social web sites and tools. Having built, managed, and iterated on intranet groupware and community tools for tens of thousands of distributed employees and business partners, I had great interest in seeing what happened with social sites on the web.

It was no surprise to me when variants of the web’s social tools and services started coming inside the firewall that adoption was less than optimal, because these social tools were being honed and iterated on early adopters and assumptions that are very counter to the majority of the population (some 90% are outside of this early adopter trend using the tools).

Early on I learned the easiest means of getting adoption with tools and services is to emulate who things are done by people without technology mediating the tasks or flows. Regarding social interactions these is never more true.

Most of the social tools are not very social in the way that the majority of people are social. This is very problematic inside an organization because businesses and organizations are social by nature and must be to have any success. People must be social and interact with each other inside the organization (meetings, reviews, research, sharing findings, etc.) as well as to the outside with their customers and clients.

What many of these social tools, and business tools in general, have done is add friction to social interactions that are required by businesses to survive. These newer class of tools are moving towards emulating true human social interactions more closely, but we still have a long long way to go. Where the social web tools have fallen down is focussing on the early adopters, but in reality that is core group of people who come to these sites and services (services like AOL, Yahoo, and Facebook have over the years broken into more mainstream customer bases, but the customers are most often not using the really new “cool” stuff).  The lessons learned from most web social services often don’t work well inside organizations as they are not lessons learned from a full broad population, like the ones inside an organization.

Real Needs

Businesses and organizations have real needs for these social tools, as their organizations are quite inefficient and they know it. They know the value that these tools can bring and many have experimented with these tools in the past year or few, but have been stumped by lack of use and adoption.

Organizations are forever trying to optimally capture what they know (hence knowledge management interest), get information out easily to those who need it (portals), connect employees to each other (groupware), connect to customers and business partners more easily (B2B tools), and better connect the company to its employees (HR tools). All of these have received incredible funding and effort over the years. Some have decent payoffs to the organization (return on investment (ROI)), but rarely are they the large successes that had been promised or hoped for.  One of the big reasons is the tools got in the way.

Real Solutions

Getting the tools out of the way and allowing for people to interact as needed and as is comfortable is where success lies for tools and services in organizations. This is why I am passionate about this area and why I like focusing inside as not only do I see real solutions lurking in what has been done in what is called Web 2.0, but business and organizations see that same.

What is needed is using the understanding of organizations, the new tools, and marrying that to how real people are social and interact so to get to real optimal solutions.

Latency from Heavy Computational Requirements

What? I am hearing screaming from the engineers about the computational power needed to do this as well as the latency in this system. Design Engaged 2005 I brought up a similar scenario, within context of my Personal InfoCloud and Local InfoCloud frameworks called Clouds, Space & Black Boxes (a 500kb PDF). The key then as it is still is using location and people to build potential context and preprocess likely queries.

When my phone is sharing my location with the social contextual memory parser service that see I am quite near a book store (queue the parsing for shared books, favorited conversations with books, recent wish list additions (as well as older additions), etc. But, it is also at the time I usually eat or pick up food for a meal, so restaurant and food conversations parsed, food blogs favorited (delicious, rated on the blogs, copied into Evernote, or stored in Together or DevonThink on my desktop, etc.) to bring new options or remind of forgotten favorites.

Now, if we pull this contextual relevance into play with augmented reality applications we get something that starts bringing Amazon type recommendations and suggestions to play into our life as well as surfacing information “we knew” at some point to our finger tips when we want it and need it.

Inside the Firewall

I have been helping many companies think through this inside the firewall to have, “have what we collectively know brought before us to help us work smarter and more efficiently”, as one client said recently. The biggest problem is poor metadata and lack of even semi-structured data from RDFa or microformats. One of the most important metadata pieces is identity, who said what, who shared it, who annotated it, who commented on it, who pointed to it, and what is that person’s relationship to me. Most organizations have not thought to ensure that tiny slice of information is available or captured in their tools or service. Once this tiny bit of information is captured and contextualized the results are dramatic. Services like Connectbeam did this years ago with tags in their social bookmarking tool, but kept it when they extended the ability to add tagging in any service and add context.

On Jul 21, 2009, at 8:59 AM, Thomas Vander Wal wrote:

The conversations models & how they map to the difference faces & steps in the communication progression from personal, collective, community/group, and collaborative have interest to me. Each are different design problems with very different interaction & communication needs, hence leading to different conversation models.

• Personal: Focussed on holding on to objects (including people & relationships) and annotating for refinding and aggregating as needed.
• Collective: Open sharing/stating around objects (with various possibilities around level of sociality) with some conversation directly with them in comments, but also indirect conversations (friendfeed, microsharing, etc.)
• Community/Group: Fully aware of others with interests around the object and interacting with the others in a manner that is open to others in the community/group.
• Collaborative: Goal is getting down to one view and one product. This requires the means to identify and work through conflicting concepts and understanding. Requires working together and identifying, addressing, and working through conflict to come to one resolutions (there can not be more then one personal day policy in an organization).

On Jul 21, 2009, at 12:25 PM, adrian chan wrote:

these are cats used by ross, clay and others that i'm not totally aligned with. primarily because I don't think they reflect anthropological or sociological distinctions in interaction systems or situations. (e.g. paired interactions, triangulated interactions, group membership, inter-group interaction, alliance, family, tribe, community, or now the social media-specific formations which seem to be "invisible audiences," "publics" or "audiences" depending on who you talk to.)

for example i don't think "collective" is a natural social phenomenon but if it occurs is a byproduct or outcome of carefully structured interactions in which personal social dimensions are minimized to reduce the bias of status, rank, hierarchy and other attention-getting behaviors. Which is why Hunch.com has shirky written all over it, or why we all use wikipedia as our reference standard for collective action!

in other words,

• a structuralist would tell us that these categories don't exist.
• a sociologist would say that forms of communication and social practices transcend these categories and may be found in the reproduction in any of these categories, so cant be the causal explanation for how these categories of content production are realized.
• a psychologist would say that user motives are not a reflection of a kind of social arrangement, that for example interpersonal stuff, attractions and flirting, lurking etc can all occur in social groups of different sizes and structure
• a social media theorist might say that it matters more how people see others, see themselves, and think they see how they are seen by others, and that the constraints on action in and results out are what govern behavior -- but that users wont have "collective" or "collaboration" etc in mind when they're acting -- that user centric view will prevail over an architectural one

i think where shirky has a blindspot is in motives -- he's a good pattern recognizer but patterns can be effects without being causes, or without being the goal or the motive of a certain user's activity.

where shirky sees structure as a way of possibly eliminating social distortions, i still think it's essential to know how the user sees himself in the social field to know where bias may be introduced.

and in today's highly conversational mediaverse, these structures are hard to map to aggregation, disaggregation, and other twitter/status feed phenomena. twitter and its kin are so fluid, so ephemeral and time-based, that it's hard to grasp the causes of social outcomes without using communication theory and interaction dynamics (which i sloppily call "conversation models"). challenge being that one has to capture what interests a user -- could be their own status, could be their reputation, their commitment to a higher goal, their need for attention, etc, all of which come out in conversation but none of which are governed by structural arrangements (like collab, collective, or community)....

in short the question you raise is: does the social order account for user behavior? Is the social order the user's orientation. I don't think it is, but that would be my bone to pick with ross or shirky (some day....)

what do you think? am i making sense?

On Jul 21, 2009, at 9:52 AM, Thomas Vander Wal wrote:

Your approach makes sense and fits wonderfully within social comfort. One of the things I have found working with organizations on the inside is the assumptions from the outside (open web tools) are broken. Adoption of the same patterns outside don't happen inside organizations, as the measures are vastly different (outside pure numbers (100k to millions of users) and inside is percentage of employees/customers). Our assumed understanding for tools and models from web 2.0 don't really work well when dealing with closed populations. What we realize is these tools are less than optimal on the web too. This was my huge problem in writing my book (Understanding Folksonomy) for O'Reilly, I could not explain value that was derived nor could I explain things that were broken.

Conversation models fit nicely in social comfort, which I currently have set within the elements of social software and build order. Unless the prior elements are met, there is no communication/conversation. The realm of social is far more complex and runs on many different planes and models at once. There is no pure model, but a mixture of models and understandings.

The elements of social software and social comfort are important in all of the faces of perception (where personal, collective, community, collaboration, newbie, system owner, and external developer) come into play as task roles. But, seen from the perspective of a cube or other polygon, we can see many sides at once and are participants in the various tasks and faces.

I agree and disagree with "but that users wont have "collective" or "collaboration" etc in mind when they're acting" as I see the mindset of whom am I sharing with (how broadly) and goals (stated or inferred) with the task type, when users are interacting with others on internal social tools. But, it is not the user's perspective that is at the forefront as much as it is having the proper tools with the proper elements to achieve each type of task. Most organizations do not think of the progression of tasks and ensure their tools embrace the needs at the various stages. Often true collaboration elements are missing as well as desperately needed tools for personal tasks.

Twitter and Microsharing for Enterprise

There were a handful of very well attended sessions on Twitter and similar microsharing tools for the enterprise this year (last year only one). The sessions were largely love-fests of "isn’t this great" and "here is the value", which is good. But, there are some downsides that need addressing and sticking my head in a few sessions (too packed to get a seat) and talking with others who attended the sessions, the downsides (they have solutions, but not quite built yet) were not highlighted nor were the potential solutions.

I am skipping the positives of these tools as they are can be found quite readily. The cautions and lessons learned relate to two points the volume & velocity of information and use/reuse of the snippets.

Nearly every organization that has successful adoption with microsharing tools quickly believes there can be too much of a good thing. Like my presentation last year at Enterprise 2.0 (After Noah: Making sense of the flood (of information) microsharing has great content flowing through it, but it needs filters (on who and what) as well as as attractors for grabbing things that are valuable that pass through when the user is not looking (the "if it is valuable it will find you" is not something that you want your organization to depend upon).

The second issue is use and reuse of that information. The information snippets running through the microsharing tools are often valuable, some have future value and are received out of the context of need, while others have current value. Most of the tools only focus on sharing the snippets not holding on to them or easily turning them into other valuable information forms (documents, blogs, aggregation of related items for discussion, etc.). Without thinking of what comes next with information flows in the organization’s ecosystem problems get created quickly from the cool adoption. That is not to say that the solutions are difficult or around the corner, but they are not in most products yet.

One service that I saw in the exhibit hall that used the organization’s ecosystem well was Brainpark. Brainpark is a mix of microsharing, aggregation of information and objects, and builds off of experience across the organization. It is a hosted solution that is a fully open space and transparent across the organization (depending on your organization that is good or less than optimal (Sarbanes Oxley peeks in).

Case Studies Predominantly from Government and Government Contractors

This year, just like the past two a majority of the case studies were government or government contractors. Susan Scrupski asked in a Tweet why this was so. One reason (having worked inside government as a contractor doing this things nearly a decade ago) is freedom to talk about what is going on. Many businesses look at these tools as competitive advantage and will talk about the their success on a high level, but lessons learned (downsides) start running into SEC regulations and admissions of less than optimal results (a downside for stocks). Also many of the companies using the new breed of social tools are technology related companies and often they are considering how to turn what they have deployed into a product they can sell in the future or at least a service offering. This sharing can run a foul of SEC restrictions. The government organizations and government contracting companies are freer to discuss their implementation of these tools and the contracting companies see this as a means to pitch their capabilities.

Last year Lockheed Martin generated a lot of buzz with their discussion of the platform they assembled and built. This year they discussed it in more depth, but the point that the only two infringements on their service were one person selling their car (no commerce is allowed) and one person criticizing a decision by the CEO (nobody is allow to criticize the CEO) were good for demonstrating how well people use the social tools with little concern (although the buzz from LM’s presentation to a person this year was "I will never work for LM because you can’t criticize the CEO").

Booz Allen Hamilton was the Open Enterprise winner and discussed in-depth their tool deployment and their use of open source tools and low cost for deploying. This was quite a different perspective from Lockheed Martin’s deployment last year that was incredibly costly.

Open Source Tools as First Step

One thing that I have seen across the years, not only at Enterprise 2.0 but prior, is that many organizations start their social tool endeavors with open source tools. While I am a big proponent of open source tools, one has to be mindful of the disadvantages as well as the advantages (just like every other tool). Open source tools are a good first step to see how tools could be used in an organization, but many of the tools need extensive customization to scale and to meet the the user experience and social needs of those who are not an organization’s early adopters.

In my presentation last year "After Noah…" most of the downsides and lessons learned came from people deploying Scuttle as their social bookmarking tool. Scuttle is a decent tool for small deployments in-house that do not need to scale, but the management of the tools and the lack of intelligence in Scuttle that is needed to deliver solid knowledge and understanding around the organization are not in it. There are many elements in Scuttle that limit adoption, unless in a very tech savvy environment, and require moving to a real social bookmarking and tagging solution after six month or a year. Not only is adoption hindered, but easily surfacing information, knowledge, and intelligence captured in the tool is really difficult. Scuttle lacks the algorithms, social understanding, contextual engine, and user experience to be a long term (more than one year) solution for anything more than a small division.

The other open source tool that is widely deployed and equally as problematic as Scuttle is MediaWiki. I continually see MediaWiki deployed because it is “what is under Wikipedia”. While that is well and good to get started, MediaWiki falls into the same problems as Scuttle with adoption, scale, lack of the essentials, and missing intelligence engines. MediaWiki requires heavy modifications to work around these problems. One of the problems that is most problematic are those around human social interactions, which nearly every organization I talk with lacks in their resources as they development and design teams that build, implement, and incrementally improve their products.

Both of these tool types (social bookmarking and wikis) have great commercial products that provide much better overall adoption opportunities as well as have full-time staff who understand what is needed to get the most value out of what is contributed and how to include the difficult pieces around sociality, which greatly increase adoption and long term use.

More Than Just Tools

This year there was quite a bit of discussion at Enterprise 2.0 around tools are good, but there is much much more than just tools as as a solution. Adoption practices were discussed broadly, but some of the best snippets that echo my experience were in the video clips captured by and used by Stowe Boyd and Oliver Marks in their Open Enterprise session (the full collection of unedited video interviews are available at Enterprise 2.0 - Open Enterprise [http://enterprise2blog.com/category/open-enterprise-2009/]). One snippet that rang very true was from Charlene Li where she talked about a large hindrance to adoption was people lacking the understanding of what openness is in the enterprise and that it is a possibility. I often find most organizations need to have the conceptual model (understanding of what the tools are and freedom and control put in the people’s hands as well as it is their organization allowing them to do this) into people’s head is the first step and not talking "carrots and sticks", which often lead to less than optimal long term outcomes and often are counter productive.

It was great to hear other people discussing this in sessions as well as the hallway conversations. If this is of interest the full videos have been made available to the community to listen to and use as an open resource. Please go take advantage of it and use them to help get informed.

Gaps in Sociality

Much of my discussions with my clients and potential clients as well as my 13 years of experience building, maintaining, and improving social tools for use involves focusing on what holds back adoption and use of tools. There are four elements that need to be in balance: Tools, user experience (ease of use), sociality, and adoption/engagement resources. Much of that was discussed in sessions at Enterprise 2.0 this year was tools and adoption/engagement strategies (as just stated there were some large holes in adoption and engagement strategies). On the exhibit hall floor the vendors were touting their ease of use and user experience that is built into their products.

The big gap that was really weak was sociality. As those who have deployed tools and worked to improve them have found how people interact with other people in these digital social tools is a large area that needs addressing. This is one area that really needs to be addressed within the tools as the depth of understanding needed inside organizations to add this is rarely there. There is a large education effort needed to explain what all of this is, how to think about it, how to evaluate tools/solutions around it, how to assess existing deployments, and how to then improve them. When I have IT shops or developers in my workshops this is an area that is really not familiar to most of them. Some of the user experience designers have an understanding of the need, but lack the skills to get the back end development in place to feed the front end components. Most decision makers do not have this on their radar (unless they have had tools and services running for 6 months to a year and are looking for that next step up), but even when they do they only understand something there is broken and lack enough understanding to know how to understand the problems and then address it.

As I talked with people in the hallways and late at night and mentioned scenarios that are indicators of problems in tools around sociality, nearly everybody said yes we see a lot. To a person not one of them had thought of sociality as a problem or even knew of anybody who could help understand it and address it.

This is the next hurdle to start getting over. Hopefully next year and at this Fall’s Enterprise 2.0 in San Francisco, this will be subject matter that is covered so to highlight where the problems lay and how to start working with vendors and developers on ways to improve on what is there.

[If you are looking to get a grounding in this I am finally offering workshops on Social Design for Enterprise, which is described in more depth in the Rock Stars of Social CRM. The real stories, experience, value to organizations, tethering CRM and interaction in social tools not only was great from a showing the power of use of tools in a manner that had deep business value, but the stories of real use and lack of tools and services around optimized use of the tools. This session really should have been not only in the main tracks, but could have stood out enough to have been a main session. It added credibility and depth of understanding social tools from a business perspective in a manner that makes the usual social media discussions look incredibly thin. Radian6, Chris Brogan, Paul Greenberg, Brent Leary, Frank Eliason, and Michael Thomas (National President of the CRM Association) did a killer job with this session and totally rocked the house.

Tagging

Lastly, tagging. While there was not tagging focussed session and tagging has become the sleeping giant (nearly every social software consultant with deep background asked why there was not a session on tagging as they are finding it is one of the most valuable resources in their tool belt for driving value to their customers). Connectbeam and Lotus Connections Dogear were on the Exhibition floor and were getting attention, I heard nearly every other vendor touting they have tagging in their offerings. This is a good thing and something that is also problematic.

About four years ago I prognosticated tagging would be in most tools, but that reality was going to be problematic unless tagging was done well (at a minimum object being tagged, tag, and cross tool identity of the person tagging). Well this last year I had one large client hit that problem and since I have heard of it five or six more times. While some commercial tools have done tagging well most home grown or open source solutions (see the WikiMedia mention above) do not.

My presentation from last year is even more relevant this year and there is a dire need for aggregation and disambiguation across tagging in various tools. At the Enterprise 2.0 conference I heard this echoed many times when I started asking about tagging in deployments. There is much more to write on this and to share (yes the book is still coming and much of this will be addressed there as well as in future posts).

Summary

Enterprise 2.0 has become my favorite conference as the problems I have been seeing for years and working on resolutions are echoed here. The reality of Web 2.0 and social interaction hits home here, particularly the lack of depth and problems in the Web 2.0 tools (which also need to be addressed, but with millions of users it looks like success not a really small percentage of adoption).

I am looking forward to next year as well as the Enterprise 2.0 San Francisco conference in the Fall.

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.