Collaboration, collaboration, collaboration

By Phil Muncaster -

Adobe has just launched the latest version of its near ubiquitous Acrobat PDF-presentation software. At first glance this seems like potentially the driest bit of news you'll have heard in a long while, but the firm has made some significant feature enhancements which could change the way knowledge workers share information and even redefine the way we think about the popular document format.

Acrobat 9's major improvement is that it now supports Adobe's Flash technology, so that video and application files can be embedded in PDFs. And the demo I was given by Adobe was pretty impressive; engaging and dynamic are two words the vendor uses about ten times in every sentence, but they actually rang pretty true this time – the PDFs I was shown using Flash were unlike any PDFs I'd ever seen before. There are also capabilities to combine a variety of media types into a single compressed document called PDF Portfolios. This can then be presented in a variety of ways according to the user's whim.

Collaboration was the key theme of the release though and with Adobe.com, a new suite of online services, the firm is offering workers the ability to collaborate in real-time with each other. There is also an online word processor -  Buzzword – and a file sharing and storage service. But perhaps the most useful part of Adobe.com is a new feature which allows users to capture entire web sites and save them in PDF format. Not sure what the copyright implications are here but it will be an incredibly useful for mobile workers cut off from internet access for long periods. Productivity gains, collaboration improvements, more engaging content – it's all looking pretty healthy for Adobe, but we all know what impact Flash had on web sites back in the 90s. If people start to these capabilities with similar indiscipline – it could seriously backfire.

Facing up to Facebook fears

Have you been messing around on Facebook today at work? I only ask because one of the biggest barriers to corporates accepting Web 2.0 in the workplace appears to be a concern by top management that employees latest cunning ruse to spin the company into the bankruptcy courts is to spend every working minute on social networking sites instead of …well working.

Yesterday Web 2.0 Strategies conference held a panel discussion on the pros and cons of tools such as Facebook in the workplace (I would have posted this earlier but I was caught up on IM with a few mates discussing Germany’s shock defeat in Euro 2008, surprising huh?)

Anyway back to social networking tools. At the moment the vast majority of employers appear to put restrictions of varying degrees of ferocity on the use of Facebook et al. The most usual appears to be only use at lunchtime or before/after core work hours. At least that was the verdict from around 70% of the show of hands at the conference. Of course not all employers are the same. Those with Web 2.0 tools to promulgate are much more likely to encourage an open access approach to social networking. These firms proclaim the benefit of social networking as a business tool, such as a way to find information quickly - though like any other tool some training is usually required. They have common sense procedures (i.e. don’t reveal any data, corporate or social which could be exploited or stolen).

A leading London law firm recently banned Facebook and then was forced to do a U-turn as presumably desperate juniors who never see daylight because of the ridiculous working hours explained they needed some form of social life.

A lot of this angst has little to do with technology tools. If you can’t trust your employees to access Facebook in a responsible manner, can you trust them to make a sensible business decision in any other area? Maybe the recruitment policy and company culture need to be examined.

Web 2.0 is accelerating the blurring of the boundaries between work and the rest of our lives. We no longer necessarily go to work but work comes to us through mobile technology and communication tools. Social tools are here to stay: yes a small minority of employees will abuse these tools just as the unmotivated and poorly managed always have found methods to shirk. Much more significantly, management will gradually start to grasp the benefits as these tools are profitably integrated into the working environment.

See www.web2strategies.co.uk for more details.

Why Web 2.0? Why now?

A good question posed at another session at today’s Web 2.0 Strategies conference. Speaker, Simon Wardley, an independent consultant, explained the ins and outs of business competitiveness and how we now inhabit a world of web 2.0.

Apart from the humorous use of fighting kittens pictured within his presentation, it all worked to show us how we got here and where we might be heading next. While I would love to detail how Wardley laid this all out in his 200 plus slides (trust me - it worked) time does not permit, so I will outlined a couple of the more central points.

In a somewhat roundabout way of explaining why all of the web 2.0 phenomena is actually quite important to organisations, Wardley  outlined the process of commoditisation; “yesterday’s exciting hot things, becoming today’s normal, commonplace and boring items”. There is always a pressure for commoditisation to happen he said, as everyone wants that competitive advantage. To my mind its similar to those kittens all chasing after an infinite ball of unravelling string. If they stop chasing they inevitably get further and further behind and eventually go out of business.

Web 1.0 became commoditised said Wardley referring to Nick Carr’s ideas that whereas once IT was all about getting bigger and better tech than your competitors to gain advantage, it is now just an accepted cost of business. IT has/is shifting from product to service in its nature and this has had a massive influence on the innovation and evolution of technology within it.

Enter Web 2.0 which embodies the notion of service within it. The move of IT to service-based industry only serves to encourage innovative technologies that you see in what we call web 2.0. As web 2.0 becomes evermore commoditised and commonplace, consider what will be next. for example if you are playing with "web 3.0" technology which is still very much in it innovative stage you can identify three pointers about it. One, that at the moment there is a scarcity of information about it – no case studies for example, second there are a lack of competitors out there (or they are few and far between), lastly, anything new you do will be expensive and therefore risky.

As an information professional it may be of some worth knowing that the latest tech you have been playing with outside of work might just be the next thing your organisation needs to stay ahead of the game. Let them know, what you know about.

Good Morning from Web 2.0 Strategies

Opening this morning’s proceedings was Chair and social computing expert Euan Semple. Well known as a pioneer of blogging and for his work developing the BBC’s online assets, Euan began by asking how many of the days attendees were working on web 2.0 or enterprise 2.0 initiatives, a few hands were shown. We were either feeling a bit shy or more likely, adoption and uptake is still in its infancy. That seems to tally up with the majority of Global 2000 firms who are now buying and investing in Enterprise 2.0 tools this year. Interestingly, lag tends to come from the more nimble SME sized companies.

The first keynote session examined the strategic value of enterprise 2.0, how web 2.0 is transforming the world of business. Dion Hinchcliffe,  Editor in Chief of Social Computing Magazine and business strategist, talked about how social media and enterprise 2.0 is seeing interest on a global level, how wikis are generating a massive interest, growing significantly in the last 3 to 4 years despite being around for much longer than that.

Why should your organisation adopt Enterprise 2.0 tools? Well improved communications obviously, higher productivity, cross pollination and leverage of knowledge is also key. The ROI apparently comes from a greater innovation in the organisation although that kind of result will take time to become evident, let alone directly measure.

In 2008 all the big vendors (such as Oracle or SAP) are either already offering or developing enterprise 2.0 products. But be aware older products are out there being retrofitted and relabelled. I got the impression from Hinchcliffe that doesn’t have to be a problem so long as what is released works well.

Security issues, and cultural set-ups can be a cause of hold-up depending on the kind of organisation you work for. Sometimes you don’t want all your best ideas floating around out there when they can so easily walk out the door on a disk.

All the same, Hinchlciffe explained how communities of users (customers in general) are often some of the best people to tell you what works and doesn’t about your products and services. Consider too what Hinchcliffe referred to as the ‘Network effect’ which "occurs when a good or service has more value, the more that other people have it too.”

Now couple that with the background, internal expert knowledge worker and you have a valuable well of information to tap into.

From all of this I see an emerging role for the information worker, one who knows how best to encourage knowledge leverage by the workforce but also communicate with the end–user. They appreciate already the need to keep that knowledge and information secure. This role needs expertise but also creativity, energy and a voice. Is that you?

More from Web 2.0 strategies later…

Inspired by information

I have to admit a growing weakness for the increasingly imaginative ways people dream up for displaying information. A recent favourite was Google Maps Street View option. If you haven’t seen it already, it allowed you to not only zoom onto a specific street, but also get on the ground as it were and manoeuvre as if you were there. Finding my old apartment block outside Lafayette Park, SF which I haven’t seen for many years was amazing for two reasons; one that I could still vividly remember a city I lived in but hadn’t been back to in over two decades and secondly that I could go whenever I liked (apart from the cars, the street has hardly changed). Truly technology allows us the opportunity to know more about the World. In saying that, the potential for exploiting information in applications like this, can bear more fruit than my trip down memory lane.

From San Francisco and a bad pun, we move to London and the work of UCL's Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), with MapTube designed to share maps and data using GMapCreator software.

The idea is for people to share data by overlaying it on a map, in this case, of London. Information related to the city can then be visualised in a different way, but the potential for any geographic region is there.

Specifically, there are examples on MapTube showing a mashup of population density in relation to the layout of the tube network. Because we now operate in a web 2.0 world anyone can add a map of their own, the raw data they use on the map however remains safely offline. Yet everyone can view the results. It is all very revealing.

From what is already up there, contributors have created some pretty insightful ways of presenting data, want to know where the highest growth for new building construction is, or the areas with the greatest e-awareness are? Perhaps you are researching the dispersal of ethnic populations around the city? The pattern of secondary school locations throughout the capital is there for all to see.

At the moment its early days (I could only fine a total of 69 records up on the site), but I love how this is beginning to take form. There is nothing to say why more regional, national and international maps shouldn't start to appear and nothing to stop those with access to data like you from collaborating.

Exploring new and innovative way to harness the power of information is what the creative information professional is all about in 2008. If you have any online tools you think deserve recommending, please feel free to share.

Note
On Thursday IWR will be blogging from the newly launched Web 2.0 Strategies Conference in Covent Garden. Check back then for regular updates from our sister-show all day.

E-commerce and content management

If you report regularly on the e-commerce industry, it very soon becomes clear that there's pretty much only one story worth telling: online retail is booming. In fact, we've run out of superlatives to describe the inexorable progress of e-commerce as firms report bigger and bigger profits via their online channels – even the spectre of identity theft and other security concerns, and the constant problems with delivery, have failed to put a dent in the figures.

The latest firm to chart the progress of the channel was Verdict Research, which last week released figures pointing to a year-on-year rise in spending of 35 per cent to £14.7bn last month. Furthermore it predicted that the figure would reach £44.9 billion by 2012, as more people become comfortable with surfing the web, spend more per purchase, and shop more frequently.

A massive opportunity for firms then, and even for public sector organisations to create efficiencies by pushing services online. But badly managed content on many organisations' sites is still proving to be a massive barrier to achieving these goals. How many times have you visited a site and found that the products listed online don't tally with those in the firm's bricks and mortar store, for example? Or that some sales and promotions are still listed on the site when said promotional period has long since expired? Or even that items quoted as in stock on the site are actually not?

It's the kind of thing that will put off most customers, force them to a rival and convince them never to return. Customer expectations are so high in the wonderful world of the web, and brand loyalty so low, that the stakes are raised significantly. Yet many don't give their online strategy the time or resources it deserves, according to Robert Bredlau of web content management vendor e-Spirit. Yes, he would say that, you'd probably think, but that doesn't mean it's not true! Even in the public sector, if it's difficult to find content, or if content hasn't been managed and refreshed so that it's up-to-date and accurate, this could mean citizens picking up the phone, or using other less efficient channels – putting extra strain on staff and resources.

E-Spirit argued that even firms targeting a UK audience should cover all bases by offering multi-language support, and that they could also benefit from buying systems which enable them to integrate their channels more effectively. With mobile commerce on the horizon and slowly gaining ground, this is a complex affair, but a necessary step. Those that get it are making hay, but those that don't need to realise that an effective web content management system is an essential foundation for a successful online strategy.

Knowing what you dog knows

Caught in the gridlock in West London, part of the gloom that descended as I crawled along in the traffic mayhem caused by a burst water pipe, was the knowledge of the mounting unanswered emails that really needed dealing with before the weekend. Of course journalists are paranoid about information: we want as much of it as possible and when we’re not actually hacking out the words we spend a great deal of time reading whatever we can (online and offline) in a futile bid to ensure we don’t miss that vital story that will… well will make us what?

But whatever the reason, our ceaseless searching and reading has been made worse not better by the digital era. Alongside information professionals, I reckon journalists suffered information overload before any other segment of the working population. Of course, dedicated technologists out there would tell me that the thing to do about email traffic jams is to find a technological based solution. While I’m not that bothered about the government reading my emails (I object in principle of course but I can’t claim to be hiding anything anyone would really want to find out)  I don’t want to sub-contract the reading of emails to a machine. Hence my doubts over SNARF. SNARF, the Social Network and Relationship Finder, developed initially by Microsoft Research to deal with the post-vacation email deluge. “SNARF grew out of an exploration of how people triage their e-mail and whether social information would help,” says A.J. Brush, a researcher within Microsoft Research’s Community Technologies Group who was one of a small team who devised the project several summers ago. “We often say, ‘Your dog knows the difference between strangers and friends who visit your house; why shouldn’t your e-mail client?’ ” A.J. Brush clearly hasn’t met my dog but I get the point.The process on which SNARF is based is called social sorting. According to Microsoft, the concept has been around for a while and now it is meant to be simple. The tool, which has been deployed within Microsoft for a field study, simply counts e-mails, sorts them by sender, and draws conclusions about their relative importance from the intensity of the correspondence relationship.Microsoft says that when launched for the first time, SNARF indexes your e-mail. When indexing is complete, a window with three panes is displayed. The top pane includes a list of people who have sent recent, unread e-mail addressed or cc’d to you. The middle pane includes people who have sent recent, unread e-mail addressed to anyone. And the bottom pane includes all people mentioned in any e-mail you have received in the past week.A configuration panel enables you to change the types of messages displayed and to sort them in different ways. Once you have the tool configured as you prefer, you can double-click on a contact’s name within one of the panes, then view a list of all recent e-mail from that person. It works with mailing lists, too, and you can organise mail by threads and read the entire thread in chronological order, top to bottom.Sounds right up my street. In fact in the traffic snarl up I promised myself I would try it for myself. Now sat in front of the screen I’m just not so sure. Perhaps I’ll clear these near-on 500 unread messages while I think about it.

Blogosphere: Information professionals guiding you to the best bits of the blogosphere

Much relieved Fulham FC fan James Lappin tracks the inspiration for his blogging career back to reading a Korean poem while waiting for a haircut in a barber's shop in Surrey

Q: What do you do?
A: I am a 39-year-old records management consultant and trainer,
working for TFPL in London.

Q: Where is your blog?
A: I am one of the contributors to the TFPL blog, at http://tfpl.typepad.com

Q: Describe your blogposts
A: I post about what I see as the big issues for information professionals in our age. Questions like

- To what extent can/should we integrate Web 2.0 tools and practices into the information mix of our organisations?
- How do we respond to the challenges and opportunities brought by the rise of SharePoint?
- How will the battle between Google and Microsoft affect our desktops?
- How do we strike a balance between our responsibilities for information governance, and the demand for collaborative environments such as SharePoint and Web 2.0 tools?

My colleagues have a range of interests, all centred on what is going on in the information professions. Like me, they post about events they have attended or organised, industry trends, and the questions they grapple with in their consultancy, training or recruitment work.

Q: How long have you been blogging?
A: I have had a personal blog at www.worldflapjackday.blogspot.com since New Year's Eve 2005. I still keep it going as a place for my drawings, for things that my kids say that make me laugh, and for my thoughts on contemporary art and Fulham matches. Val Skelton, our head of training started the TFPL blog in January 2007 and invited me to write for it.

Q: What started you blogging?
A: A Korean poem! I was waiting to get my hair cut in a Korean barber's in New Malden and saw a poetry book on the table. One of the poems compared the mind to a pond: many birds drop into your pond, but the white swan comes only occasionally. You should make sure your pond/mind is ready for the swan. A close friend had just died and it reminded me of him. I set up World Flapjack Day that night to write about it. Having written for my personal blog for a while, I realised I wanted a space to write about my thoughts on the world of managing information. I was inspired by the blogs of people like Euan Semple http://theobvious.typepad.com/blog and wanted to get in on the conversation. Blogging on the TFPL blog has been ideal: it gives me a platform and helps my company too.

Q: Do you comment on other blogs?
A: I don't comment on other people's blogs nearly as much as I ought to. By posting a comment you are showing the blog owner that you're interested in what they are writing about, and you have something to say about it too. You have made a connection, and something might come of it: they might look at your blog, they might like it, they might leave a comment or link to it. All good stuff! I love it when people comment on our blog. A comment on a post of mine alerted me to the existence of Pageflakes www.pageflakes.com which is a fantastic combination of a start page and an RSS reader.

Q: How does your organisation benefit from your blogosphere presence?
A: I see it as the online equivalent of some of the networks we run for information professionals (such as TFPL Connect). It shows our friends and customers what TFPL consultants, trainers and recruiters are thinking about, what we know about, and what we care about.

Q: What are the blogs you trust?
A: In the records management field, the best blog has to be Steve Bailey's RM Futurewatch http://rmfuturewatch.blogspot.com Steve believes that traditional records management tools and practices won't scale up to the volume and pace of 21st century information creation and exchange, and advocates harnessing Web 2.0 ideas to records management. In the knowledge management sphere, I read Dave Snowden's Cognitive Edge blog http://www.cognitive-edge.com/blogs/dave

Q: Does it help your career?
A: Blogging keeps me sharp. It motivates me to attend events, to listen to people, to search out items of interest, and to capture my notes on talks that interest me. It all helps to keep my consultancy and training fresh and relevant.

Q: Which blogs do you read for fun?
A: The best Fulham blog has to be the Craven Cottage Newsround
http://cravencottagenewsround.wordpress.com I also enjoy reading the Forbidden Planet blog http://www.forbiddenplanet.co.uk/blog It's my favourite comics blog, and is a superb example of a company using a blog to showcase the knowledge and passion of its staff.

Q: Which bloggers do you watch and link to?
A: The first blog that I put on the TFPL blogroll was the Librarian's
Guide to Etiquette http://libetiquette.blogspot.com because it made me laugh.

The ReadWriteWeb blog http://www.readwriteweb.com is invaluable for developments in technology and Web 2.0. And Johnny Moore http://www.johnniemoore.com/blog blogs about facilitation and the uses of Web 2.0.

Small and perfectly formed?

The new features could be an attempt by the firm to improve its standing among smaller enterprises, and extend the success it has had with the Mini in public sector and education verticals into new areas. It’s also pretty clear that with rivals IBM and Microsoft both offering competing products at this low end which unlike the Mini are free (IBM Omnifind Yahoo Edition and Microsoft Search Server Express) Google has had to offer something more than basic enterprise search to get the attention of corporate buyers.

Google has just updated its Mini enterprise search appliance, as some of you may have noticed. Now there are myriad enterprise search vendors knocking about and they are all trying to differentiate – some, like Autonomy and Fast, are purely targeted at the high end large enterprise market, while others, Google, Microsoft and IBM included, have a range of products to meet the needs of different sized organisations. With the Mini, Google is really targeting the small to mid sized market, probably firms with no more than 2000 users or so – its Google Search Appliance range takes it from there into the larger sized organisations.

The firm USP seems to be in trying to apply its mantra for web search to the enterprise space, that is to democratise access to information – to enable all employees to reach the info they need, in a safe and secure manner. Implementation and maintenance is also a differentiator for the firm, Google believes; the box can be up and running in a matter of weeks not months, although the vendor’s UK head of enterprise Robert Whiteside stressed that this shouldn’t be firms’ main reason for buying the appliance.

So why should firms invest in the Mini? Well, Google certainly seems to be ramping up the feature-set in its low-end appliance. The latest to be added, aside from the obligatory extended language support, are the ability to index content on shared files, as well as date and source bias capabilities. As the name suggests, this means customers can give greater weight to older or newer documents as they wish, and can also specify by source which types of content they rate more highly.

I'll get me coat...

By now my picture may have disappeared from the sidebar of this blog. It's because, for the past eight months, I've been burning too many candles at too many ends. Something had to give and, while my relationship with the IWR folk is still good, I just can't keep up with the weekly blog. I'm so sorry (although I'll understand perfectly if you're not!) You'll still be getting a column from me once a month.

What's taken over a large chunk of my life is working with Freeform Dynamics, a boutique research and analysis firm which publishes a lot of its stuff freely. My particular responsibilities centre around environmental and social computing; although a lot of business people shrink from the 'social' word, so I tend to use 'collaboration' with them.

My first IWR blog post was just over two years ago (we started the blog in May 2006, despite what it says in the sidebar.) I used the Wayback Machine to find it. Just provide a website URL and it will list all the web pages back to the start - a great way to check up on how people change their tune over the years. Or simply to do a bit of research, like I did.

Then, as now, I'd recently been in California. And my first post related to the first law of VC investment: find something that appeals to one of the seven deadly sins. Of course, unless you're a churchgoer, these don't come readily to mind. So they are: greed, envy, sloth, pride, wrath, gluttony and lust. The virtues by contrast are: faith, hope, charity, fortitude, justice, temperance and prudence. The last being much beloved of our current (is he still?) Prime Minister.

It's interesting to see how social computing and environmental concerns have tempered many people's outright pursuit of sins with more than a pinch of virtue. Yet, underneath you can't help suspecting that not much has changed. Although, perhaps because of the new circles I move in, I do see a lot more charity these days. People seem more ready to give in the online social world with little expectation of a return. The weird thing about this is that the returns come rapidly as word spreads. I had lunch with four people the other day and every one of us has benefitted financially and spiritually from our online activities, even when that's not what we set out to do. In fact, all five of us only knew each other as a result of social computing related activities.

If you're curious about who we are, one of our number, Euan Semple, posted a picture of the occasion to Flickr. Except it wasn't an occasion. We just all felt like turning online to offline for a change.

When it comes to the green side of my life, it seems that we are, once again, driven by sin on the one hand and virtue on the other. All businesses want to make money (sin or survival - take your pick). And we all want to make sure that our children and grandchildren inherit a world worth living in, which I think lies in virtues, although it could be partially driven by pride. Bosses of organisations might make environmental choices for pragmatic reasons - money, PR or regulation - but they may secure staff commitment for additional, more spiritual, reasons. If the end result works, are we bothered?

So back to the first column. My conclusion was that "information professionals may be helping users address their baser urges". Now I'm not so sure. I actually think you're better than that. I owe you an apology.

See you on the column. Or Google me if you feel so moved.

It's been fun. Thanks for reading the blog posts.