As more and more SuiteTwo rollouts are beginning to come online, we've been able to produce some new case studies. Amongst this new batch:
-Clinical Trials is using SuiteTwo to help patients find potentially lifesaving experimental treatment.
-Servlinx is looking towards SuiteTwo to streamline their international collaboration efforts.
-Novii Design is helping organizations in the public sector to get their collaboration on.
'When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail.' I've heard and been using this expression for 20 years. It's one of my favorites and you can apply it to just about anything. I believe I first heard the expression when I was actually using a hammer. I used to work summers while I was in college in construction, doing roofing and siding. Back then we did use our hammer for everything. Need a piece of wood strapping shortened, just hit it with the claw end of a hammer enough and the piece would fall off. It saves the time of going down a ladder when you are 30 feet up in the air. If you needed some flashing or lead bent, just hit it with the hammer a few times till it conformed to the shape you needed it to be. I had a colorful boss who was full of one liners and his way of imparting knowledge was usually to threaten you with what he called his '28 ounces of persuasion'. So, when you have a hammer everything can be your nail. I think most people get the true meaning and employ this theory everyday in their lives. Adapt what you know to what you need.
In Corporate America email has become the hammer. Think about how we use email today. Big deal closes, send an email. Birth announcement, send an email. Food leftover in the conference room, send an email. This one is my personal favorite since I've worked remotely for a number of companies and would really like one of those chocolate chip cookies. Instead I'm left wanting. For the most part these are the emails you don't care about and I'm sure there have been studies done that show how many useless emails a person gets per day/week/month and how many years of their lives are wasted reading them. There are also those emails that you do care about. Examples, want to schedule a meeting with a couple of people? Send an email to the group and then sit back and watch the emails come flying in as everyone let's you know what days and times do and don't work for them. The number of emails is exponential to the number of people that will be in the meeting. Another fun one is to put a document together and email to a bunch of people for their comments. There's nothing more fun then trying to figure out how to consolidate all of those changes. Last but not least, how about the email that we send to someone that is composed of one sentence, or a sentence fragment or even one word. Think about it, you've done it. To: Joe@mycompany.com Lunch?
I think you get the point.
We could blame it on mailing lists. We could even ban the dreaded all@mycompany.com mailing list. We could blame it on the fact that we have evolved into a society that shuns the use of inter-personal communication, opting instead to compose and fire off an email to get the simplest question answered, even when it would be quicker to pick up the phone and hit a 4-digit extension and speak to the person. The problem is we still have a need to communicate the information and receive feedback in the course of our daily work. The answer lies in current and new technologies and the adequate training needed for them. Document management systems, shared calendaring and even IM have been around for quite some time. Wikis, Blogs and RSS are making their inroads. It's going to take some time but eventually corporations will adequately train their employees and users will figure out that there are easier ways of communicating then just email. Until that happens though, just make sure you send me an email if there are any leftover cookies in the conference room.
We've just made a new SuiteTwo screencast available. This one focuses on the administrative features of SuiteTwo. Subjects include
It's an interesting view, whether you already have SuiteTwo or are still considering it.
The Enterprise 2.0 model is all about collaboration and sharing great ideas. Implemented correctly, it can significantly improve your internal signal-to-noise ratio. Without stakeholder buyin, however, any Enterprise 2.0 implementation is doomed to fail. And getting your people to commit to a new and slightly scary technology can be difficult. When we first started using wikis to share marketing materials and ideas, we ran into this very problem. Although content creators were happy to make their content available through the wiki, the internal consumers were slow to accept it as a distribution tool, let alone a collaborative platform. Using the following tips, We've come a long way towards overcoming this inertia, and so can you.
1: Provide value from day one.
There's nothing quite as discouraging as staring at a blank wiki page. Before launching, set up a structural framework and populate it with the resources you already have. If your users see the inherent value of your new wiki immediately, they'll be more likely to return.
2: Prevent barriers to adoption.
Make sure your users have the access privileges they need right away. Create accounts for them in advance, preferably using existing authentication infrastructure. SuiteTwo supports ldap integration out of the box. Your users can use their existing account information and won't lose interest while they're waiting for IT to make them an account.
3: Practice what you preach.
If you expect your users to collaborate using a wiki, you'd better not still be sending them documents by email. If your team sees their leader ignoring new collaboration methods, they'll feel no imperative to adopt them themselves. So before you ask your people to buy into an enterprise 2.0 strategy, make sure you're comfortable with the technologies yourself.
4: Be firm but gentle.
Whether it's due to fear of the new, stubbornness, or pride, you will encounter holdouts. People will continue to request and distribute documents by email and keep their collaboration off-line. As their leader in this endeavor, you'll have to guide them firmly, yet gently towards the collaborative tools you've provided. If a team member emails a document to the rest of his group, remind him to put it on the wiki. If they ask for your opinion on a new idea, tell them you'll be happy to discuss it in more detail once it has its own wiki page. Remember that just a few stragglers can derail your entire collaboration strategy.
5: Use tools that work, not tools that create work.
Choose collaborative products that are intuitive. Don't expect your people to learn wikicode or html in order to create content. Find a solution that supports "what you see is what you get" editors, intuitive file uploads, and simple customization. Socialtext is a great example of an intuitive, easy to use wiki that puts the user in control.
Armed with these tips, a healthy dose of optimism, and just a tad of determination, you'll be well on your way to creating a collaborative environment that will benefit your entire team.
Ever since Tim o'Reilly dreamt up the term back in 2003, people have been asking themselves, and often me, "yes, but what does it mean?" I've been embarrassed at my inability to answer that question more than once. Even the highly talented people at Tim's own shop have been unable to answer it without resorting to a five page article featuring some of the most convoluted graphs you'll ever hope to see. Wikipedia, a web 2.0 poster child in its own right, is unable to come to an internal agreement on a definition of the term as well, settling for a watered down compromise by describing it as "the second generation of web based communities and hosted services."
With all this confusion and disagreement on what Web 2.0 means and whether it means anything at all, where do I get off trying to define it? Who died and made me king? Well, truth be told, I'm no more qualified than you are. Then again, in this web 2.0 age; nobody is more qualified than anybody.
Does that mean I can, in short, concise sentences, define Web 2.0? Well, no. Truth is, Web 2.0 is increasingly being used as a marketing synonym for "new". But underneath the hype, there is a core of meaning hidden away. Let's go digging, shall we?
It turns out that Web 2.0 can mean several things. At its most literal level, the term refers to the transition from web sites to web applications. Unfortunately there's no solid white line separating web 1.0 from web 2.0 in this regard. Why, for example, would Hotmail, a web based email site that has been around since several weeks after the invention of the wheel (you should have seen the early banner ads), be Web 1.0 while gMail, a service that for all intents and purposes does exactly the same thing, is considered Web 2.0? Why is a syndicated column web 1.0 while a blog is web 2.0? Lame as it sounds, applications and services are often branded "Web 2.0" simply because they look and feel like Web 2.0. Are the buttons glossy? Web 2.0! Does my inbox refresh without reloading my page? Web 2.0!
I'm not being fair. There's much more to Web 2.0 than glossy buttons and Ajax. There's also the small matter of an infinite number of idiots who want their opinion to be heard. This phenomenon is known as collaboration. It was once commonly referred to as "Usenet", but that's a discussion nobody wants to get involved in. However, defining Web 2.0 by its collaborative nature actually makes sense. A syndicated column is Web 1.0 because a writer writes an article and readers comment on it. A blog is Web 2.0 because you write an article and nobody comments on it, but with you a million other people are also writing an article and talking about each others' articles, often disagreeing loudly with one another.
For a poignant example, let's look at the quintessential pre-web 2.0 geek news site; Slashdot. If you've ever been there, you know that Slashdot is more about the metadiscussion than the articles themselves. And Slashdot has had a collaborative rating system for this metadiscussion for more than ten years now. Still, most people wouldn't describe Slashdot as being Web 2.0. Why is that? A cynic would say that Slashdot isn't Web 2.0 simply because it was already around when the phrase was coined, and that cynic would be partially right. After all, hasn't Slashdot been offering users collaboration and the ability to self-moderate for a decade? What's missing?
Let's compare the new touchstone for geek news; Digg. Like Slashdot, Digg allows users to comment on the articles posted and allows them to self-moderate. There's not much difference there. On the other hand, Digg has shiny buttons. More importantly, where Slashdot articles are submitted by readers, they are approved or declined by editors. Readers suggest articles, and discuss the approved articles, but do not control which articles are posted. Digg, on the other hand, allows users to submit and approve and discuss articles without editorial intervention, often to the disgust of its owners. There's no doubt that Digg is Web 2.0, and very little doubt that Slashdot isn't. In spite of its lack of shiny buttons and its age, Slashdot could be web 2.0, if only it allowed its readers to approve articles. This leads us to a rather interesting conclusion, and perhaps part of our definition:
"A site or service is only Web 2.0 when all of its parts are Web 2.0". Great. Recursion. That'll simplify things. We're actually getting closer though. For the sake of convenience, let's summarize what we've learned so far:
Have we come up with a definition yet?
"Web 2.0 describes sites or services that allow users to create, modify, rate, and comment on content as equals who collectively share full editorial control over the content and its presentation. With shiny buttons."
This raises an interesting question. What if a software giant launched a social collaboration site and nobody visited it? Would it still be Web 2.0? Is a collaborative infrastructure alone enough to term something so? While it's true that projects that strive to attain Web 2.0dom generally offer an infrastructure that is amenable to the collaboration it wishes to offer, for example through the use of formal rating systems, taxonomies, tags, and crosslinks, those things alone to not make the web 2.0, in much the same way twelve chairs, a large table, and an overhead projector does not make a board meeting. Perhaps a better term than Web 2.0 would be People 2.0.
Now. . .now we're on to something. Web 2.0 is the community of people who use the web. . .2.0. Dude, this is deep. You can't have web 2.0 without the communities, and you can't have the communities without the collaborative tools. I think we're ready to give that definition thing another shot:
"Web 2.0 is the the synergy between a community of people and the sites and services that allow them to interact with each other by offering the ability to create, modify, rate, and comment on content as inherent equals who collectively share full editorial control over the content and its presentation. With shiny buttons."
Of course, you're welcome to correct me. This is the Web 2.0, after all.
