Planet Enterprise 2.0

If you’ve heard Don talk about the Naked Corporation, you’ve probably heard that line before. Other mash ups available at Dilbert.com.

Grow Your Wiki was recently added to Alltop, an innovative site that lists the five most recent stories from a variety of sites around the web on topic pages like small business, social media, science, photography, fashion, politics, sports, etc.

Grow Your Wiki is included in both the Small Business and Social Media categories on Alltop, and I’ve spent some time exploring the other sites in those categories that were new to me. It’s also nice to see that several of the sites I regularly read, comment on, and find useful are also included on Alltop!

Alltop is an excellent site with a very simple and clear purpose that’s reflected in its equally simple and streamlined design. I think it’s complementary to an RSS feed reader, and brings information discovery and consumption full circle. Where an RSS reader can be useful for keeping track of sites you already know and want regular updates from, Alltop is a great way to peruse content from a wide variety of high quality sites and find new material that may lead you to regularly subscribe.

The Science of Love - Our forgotten Mammal Brain and its power over us

Is the 2.0 world an attempt to return to a society that fits us better? That takes into account our need to be in legitimate human relationships that fit the design of our brain?

This is a review that I first wrote it in 2003 after I had been blogging for about 18 months. My wife Robin’s mother had just died and she was away for nearly a month. Relationships were uppermost on my mind and I was feeling very sad. I was trying to find out why I felt this so deeply.

I repost this today because I am increasingly aware that the great potential for social software and the 2.0 world is not exclusively to make our business world better but to make our larger world better - to reconnect us to each other in a more human and more social way.

There is a science that underpins a better design. I have posted before of Magic Numbers - the natural scaling of group sizes for humans. Here is a review of a book that talks to the design of our brain itself and how part of it has been put aside and how it needs to be brought back into prominence. You can se as I do, that Social Software is doing just that.

A General Theory of Love by Lewis Amini and Lannon - A review

Some context - Robin my wife is away for 3 1/2 weeks and I miss her a lot. After nearly 30 years of being with each other this type of parting actually hurts. Why? Well here is how I am making sense out of this feeling.

This is a science book not a new age book. It answers some questions about why we miss each other and why relationships are so important to our health. Why does loss hurt? Is this feeling of hurt only a feeling or can it affect us physically? They say that hurts in our relationships are as wounding as say broken bones or physical wounds.

Their thesis is that we have 3 brains. The reptilian brain which controls the core life functions like the heart beating and our breathing. The limbic brain which is a mammalian construct not found in lower animals which controls our emotional life. Its main job is to keep us connected to those who matter the most too us which is essential for mamals. And then the neo cortex which humans have the most of which deals with things like speech and reason.

Today we give no credence to the limbic brain. We have put the rational or neo cortex brain up on a pedestal. We value IQ, our education system is rationally based. But really we get things done and we get through life as mammals on how well we connect or not with others.

Our EQ is as important as our IQ. Maybe more so.

Their insight is to look at the power of the mammalian brain to inform us about what is going on, to govern our health and to enable us to work effectively with others.

So missing you is more than simply missing you - the book makes the case that there is a break in my relational world. Breaks or openings in important relationships for mammals are not small things that you can rationalize away. Recall the waves of grief that came after your father and your mother’s death?

So what is this limbic mammal brain all about anyway? The big idea is that the limbic brain is our relationship brain designed to enable mammals which have live birth and which need the tribe to protect the mother to form the attachments that are essential for the success of these large investments in the other - the other baby, the mate and the tribe.

It is remarkably perceptive: acting on small cues such as pupil dilation, smell and visual cues from facial and body movement. It does not need the neo-cortex to process an immediate like, dislike, sense of unease, fear etc.

This maybe is why love hits us by surprise. It is not part of our rational brain at all. This is why we cannot rationalize a loss - so your reason tells you that your mother’s death is good for you, and your limbic brain tells you that losing your mother is a deep loss and sends waves of grief and dreams to remind you. A woman sees a man who rationally is no good as an economic provider but her limbic brain tells her to get it on as a genetic provider!

Reptiles do need need relationships because on the whole they do not raise helpless young. Most but not all reptiles abandon their offspring and most do not have mates or packs/tribes. Having no need of relationships, they are more than cold blooded they are cold emotionally. We can tell by the eyes. When we look into a shark’s or into a crocodile’s eye we see nothing coming back.

When we look into a whale or a dogs eye we see a whole world. This is the limbic brain. The limbic brain is powerful. When babies have no “relationship” such as in a Romanian orphanage not only do they fail to thrive, in the end they die. The worst punishment we can inflict on a person to to keep them in solitary confinement. The absolutely worst is compete sensory deprivation. In Ireland the British could always break a man by “hooding” him and isolating him from all sensation.

It seems that the limbic brain needs to be in active relationship with others to be happy. We need in effect to be dancing with others emotionally all the time.

A shark is like a car on cruise control - it is a closed system that only self-references. It reacts to prey but only as a target. Mammals are “open” systems. We cannot exist without referencing with others.

So, the mother who imposes her agenda on her baby, feeding, touch and control is not dancing with the baby’s cues. The husband who imposes his will is not dancing. The boss who imposes his will is not dancing. The result failure to grow and learn, stress, depression and illness. I wonder if we have ben entirely captured by the Rational Brain as represented by the corporate world of relationships which are not be definition interactive but power driven down?

There is a pattern developing for me in how I make sense of the world and why perhaps the world feels so shitty now. I think it feels so shitty because many of us are not dancing with another. We dance increasingly alone. We actually see this in dance itself. Until now all dancing especially tribal dancing was interactive. Now we stand alone on the floor and do our own thing. We have our career which supersedes our marriages and our role

I find this book very helpful in seeing a way out of our depressing and over rational world. Descartes said that “I think therefore I am”. What is becoming clear is that our foundation need as a mammal is to be in interactive and meaningful relationship with others.

Our corporate world is a machine world with machine relationships.

No amount of wellness or flex programming will change this unless the core work is to change the machine relationships to human/mammalian/tribal relationships.

When we bring the corporate world home and have corporate and functional relationships with our spouses and with our children we are on a course for unhappiness. Our spouse and our children need our attention not the things that we buy. When we live in a machine community where all we do is sleep overnight before going back to the machine place in the day - we have no community. When teachers and nurses ignore relationships and focus on technique, they miss the connection to help the other learn or heal. In missing the relationship with the other, they feel depressed.

It’s interesting to look at how power works in ape and monkey tribes. You might think that the really strong and tough alpha male gets to the top. Sometimes he does but usually the females form an alliance and ensure that a highly collaborative male who has their intersts at heart is the leader. In the context of the needs for mammals to look after each other this makes perfect sense. Today we live I think in a fantasy where we “think” that we ned no one. Like Bush we think that power is enough. Like Bush, we find that this is simply not true.

So where does blogging fit into this? I suspect that blogging is intensely mammalian and that it builds relationships and makes us feel good and hence well.

Panorama: Gold ship

I'm pretty happy with how this turned out. The fading light added definition to the clouds, and the street lamp behind conveniently illuminated the ship. If only the skyline was completely clean, but still...

[A growing number of our customers has been asking for richer ways of creating blog entries to be posted to their SharePoint environment. To answer this FAQ, I've cross-posted below a blog entry by Mike Gannotti from several months ago. For more information about Word and Windows Live Writer, visit the Microsoft Office Word team blog and the Windows Live Writer team blog, respectively.

<Lawrence />]

 

I am often asked about tools for publishing to a SharePoint blog. There are two great tools that interface with SharePoint seamlessly. If you are a user of Microsoft Office Word 2007 then you have native integration with SharePoint that is simple to setup and best of all makes use of your primary publishing tool for blog publishing as well. Don't have Word 2007? Not a problem. You can download the free Windows Live Writer tool. I have been using this versatile tool as my primary blog publishing tool as of late.

Below I have two separate videos available for viewing that demonstrate how to configure either of these tools for use against a SharePoint based blog.

• Microsoft Office Word 2007 Blog Publishing Setup
  (WMV duration 00:03:58 resolution 1024X768)
• Microsoft Live Writer Blog Publishing Setup
  (WMV duration 00:05:05 resolution 1024X768)

If you don't have Windows Media Player (running a Mac for example) you can view a lower resolution version of the file via one of the links below.

• Microsoft Office Word 2007 Blog Publishing Setup
• Microsoft Live Writer Blog Publishing Setup

Mike Gannotti
Microsoft SharePoint Technology Specialist

Hi. I’m Rob Silver, a writer on the IT Pro content team for SharePoint. I’d like to inform you about some content I recently researched and authored about governance with respect to SharePoint Server 2007. Governance is the set of policies, roles, responsibilities, and processes that you establish in your enterprise to guide, direct, and control how it uses technologies to accomplish business goals. To strike the right balance between the needs of the SharePoint users in your enterprise and the IT professionals who deploy and operate SharePoint Server, we recommend that you form a governance body that includes representatives of all stakeholders in the SharePoint deployment. This body can then create and enforce rules that govern the use of SharePoint.

Here are some topics to help you determine the aspects of your SharePoint deployment to govern and the methods to use:

• What is governance? defines governance and introduces two key areas to govern: IT services and information architecture.
• Establishing and governing a SharePoint service describes typical elements of an IT service hosting Office SharePoint Server 2007, suggests key success factors in governing the service, and provides an example of a three-tiered service.
• Implementing and governing information architecture introduces the concept of information architecture, recommends how to govern it, and presents an information architecture case study.
• Governance features in Office SharePoint Server 2007 reviews a set of Office SharePoint Server 2007 features that your organization can use to help govern your Office SharePoint Server deployment.

I’m very interested in your feedback on this new content. Do you find it useful? Is it the right level of detail? Do you agree or disagree with particular recommendations? Is there additional content you'd like to see added? There are three ways you can provide feedback. First, in each topic you will find a "Was this information helpful?" control with a text box for supplying feedback. Second, you can send us mail at "o12ITdx [at] microsoft.com". Third, you can use the "Leave a Comment" interface on this blog to provide feedback, either on this blog entry or on the governance content.

I’m looking forward to hearing from you and to evolving this content in partnership with you.

Thanks,

 

Rob Silver

Office SharePoint Server IT Pro content team

Last November the New York Times ran an interactive visualization of one of the Republican debates that absolutely wowed me. On this week’s Interviews with Innovators show I spoke with two of its creators, Gabriel Dance and Shan Carter, about that project, and about some of their other work including the stunning Faces of the Dead in Iraq. It’s a great overview of how and why the NYTimes has been raising the level of its game — and therefore of everyone’s game — in the realm of interactive data display.

There’s an odd little Web 2.0 backstory about how we arranged this interview. When I cited the credits for the debate visualizer in my blog post, I had a hunch that my use of those names would appear on the creators’ radar screens. And sure enough, I heard back from Gabriel Dance. When I didn’t find any contact info for him on his website, I went hunting around and eventually found him on Facebook.

We then began an on-again, off-again dialogue that lasted for a couple of months, until we eventually settled on a time for the interview. At one point I tried to steer the discussion away from Facebook and into regular email, but for some reason that didn’t happen, so we wound up doing all the communication in Facebook.

When we finally got together for the interview, Gabriel mentioned that he’d never been involved in such a long Facebook email thread. Me neither. Somehow we got stuck in a loop where each of us thought the other preferred to communicate only in Facebook. I was glad to know that this wasn’t some kind of Gen-Y thing, and that we both thought it was a weird glitch.

The other delightful thing about this interview is the audio quality. Gabriel and Shan called me from the Times’ tape synch facility, so their half of the call was professionally recorded, then I merged their track with my locally recorded track. Nice!

The Enterprise 2.0 community is very fortunate to have some excellent bloggers, many of whom were at our conference last year. As a small “thank you” to the bloggers for the information, insight and analysis they provide, we have offered a free conference pass for bloggers to give away to one of their readers. [...]

Correction: Spammenters*

Shame, shame, shame. I realize Social Media is the new black in the art of PR, but how irritating is this? Tammy Erickson, our in-house workforce guru, published a post today on women’s progress in the workplace on her Harvard Business School discussion leader blog. Her first comment was from Ms. Kimberly Rosenberg who lavishes her with praise then notso deftly segues into how she is using Microsoft Office Live for Small Business (no hyperlinks intended) to increase her productivity.

I sleuthed around online on Ms. Rosenberg, and it appears she has left virtually the same comment on at least 4 other blogs in the past few weeks. Ewwww.

http://www.blissfullydomestic.com/2008/04/an-organized-ho.html

http://experts.internetbasedmoms.com/aurelia/finding-balance-as-a-wahm

http://www.entrepremusings.com/index.php/2008/04/24/why-arent-there-more-rich-women-entrepreneurs/

http://empowerwomennow.com/news-women-entrepreneurs/index.php/how-to-get-your-partner-from-zero-to-hero-in-your-business/

Microsoft Office Live for Small Business product management– what are you thinking? So blatant an attempt to hawk your wares? Buy an ad. There are right ways and wrong ways to engage the blogosphere. Please start feeding any number of the excellent social media blogs that will instruct you on how to do this right. If Ms. Rosenberg works for a PR agency, send her to social media school. Or send her to start doing some homework here (Chris Brogan) and here (Brian Solis).

The smoking gun:

*Update: Thanks to Lara Kretler, the best term to describe this practice is “spammenting.”

I'll be attending Endeca Discover '08, Endeca's annual user conference, from Sunday, May 18th to Wednesday, May 21st, so you might see a bit of a lull in my verbiage here while I live blog at http://blog.endeca.com and hang out in sunny Orlando with Endeca customers and partners.

If you're attending Discover, please give me a shout and come to my sessions:

• Monday, May 19th, 3:30 pm: Better Applications through Theory
• Wednesday, May 21st, : 9:45 am: Founding Technologists Forum

Otherwise, I'll do my best to sneak in a post or comment, and I'll be back in full force later next week.

This is the first of several posts I’ll be doing about the BEA Participate conference that happened this week.  For my first subject, I’ll focus on the biggest issue for me this week: What light does this conference shed on how BEA and Oracle will mix?

This was a strange time for a BEA conference, coming on the 2 week anniversary of the closing of their acquisition by Oracle.  There weren’t a lot of balloons or cake to celebrate the acquisition - it was very quiet (as required by law and quarterly reporting deadlines).  For example, Mark Carges (EVP Products and GM, BEA) kicked things off and didn’t quite seem up to referring to BEA and Oracle as “we” yet.  There was simply a dry reference at the beginning to “Our new owners, who you will meet later”.  After the one quick reference, the rest of the presentation was BEA business-as-usual.

The second presenter was indeed “the new owners” in the form of Hasan Rizvi, VP of Fusion middleware at Oracle.  He showed a chart of all their middleware products and saying (I’m paraphrasing here) they are “best of breed, but of course BEA also has best of breed products in all these categories so that’s why this is such a good combination”.  He said they will be doing “Welcome BEA Customers” events at 25 cities in the US/Canada and 25 in EMEA. 

He introduced the BEA crowd to Oracle Fusion middleware and their tools.  The crowd didn’t seem very partisan, was attentive and soaked in the information.  From my 7 years (on and off) of going to BEA conferences I can say that, like past BEA conferences, the vibe is one of a mature, techie environment.  While JavaOne may have techies lounging on beanbags, playing videogames, and eating kiddie snacks while challenging each other to coding duels, the BEA conference attendees are mature programmers, in the second or third decade of their careers, confident in their abilities, who tend to understand the value of well architected systems.  They like BEA although they don’t need expensively produced videos making fun of their competition and they don’t paint their hair in the company colors (both of which I’ve seen at other vendor conferences). 

It’s appropriate that the Oracle and BEA colors are within a few Pantone shades of the same red since the company colors don’t represent a religious issue like it would be in some other acquisitions (the blue and purple devotees of Microsoft and Yahoo! wouldn’t have mixed as easily).  However, the BEA audience is technically adept and will require practical reasons and detailed roadmaps if they are going to buy into new Oracle+BEA solutions rather than shifting their development platforms, application server, portal, and BPM to IBM or open source.  I can’t wait to see these roadmaps, particularly in my area of portals, since there are many overlaps that will require sacrifices to resolve.  The sacrifices will take the form of placing some products and customers on the sacrificial altar or placing profits on the alter due to the long-term inefficiencies of maintaining redundant products.

And, just to prove that in the end some people always stay loyal, I counted about 300 people in the packed “What’s new with AquaLogic User Interaction” session.  When the announcer asked “how many of you still call ALUI Plumtree?” about 75% of the audience raised their hands.

It’s that time again, the hallowed Enterprise 2.0 conference is revving up for early June. I was pleased to work on the agenda this year with Steve Wylie, the conference organizer, along with other members of the advisory board. The conference is in its second year and promises to reflect the maturation that occurred in the space over the past 12 months. Although many first-time attendees to the conference will be new to Enterprise 2.0, the concepts and themes have evolved and been refined over the past 12 months. Three out of the four largest enterprise vendors are big sponsors this year (IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle.) I’m personally hoping we see relevant, interesting developments from these large vendors this year.

We are introducing two new ideas to the conference this year which I’m particularly excited about. The first is Stowe Boyd’s Launch Pad where four (whittled down from a larger number by votes) audience-chosen startups will have an opportunity to demo their products and compete for a winning spot for the best launch pad product/service. As there is such a torrent of new products coming onto the scene, this is a great attempt to filter out the most useful based on collective crowd selection. We are considering doing something very similar regarding sessions for September’s Office 2.0 conference based on the SXSW’s panel-picker software.

The second event, or maybe unevent I should say, is called Enterprise2Open. Modeled after “barcamps and unconferences,” this will be a half-day’s worth of unstructured Q&A and sharing hosted by Ross Mayfield. The unstructured, open-type of event has been popular for some time in the development community, but we thought we’d attempt to try it out this year with a non-technical audience. The format provides a no-hassle, informative forum to ask any and all of your burning questions related to Enterprise 2.0 and get answers from peers and folks in the community who may have experienced the same issues. You may want to consider getting your questions and topics suggested in advance by posting them to the Enterprise2Open wiki. You can actually be a presenter yourself, if you bring your own soap box. Just get yourself on the self-organized agenda. The entire session will run in the afternoon on Tuesday, June 11 from 1-4pm. nGenera is sponsoring the event, so I’ll be there with a few of my colleagues and customers.

Speaking of customers, Rob Carter, CIO of Federal Express is giving the opening keynote. A group of us were in Memphis at Fedex’s central distribution facility in March where we heard Rob talk on 2.0 adoption. Rob sees himself as an evangelist himself for 2.0 in the enterprise. I’m really pleased he accepted the offer to keynote on Tuesday morning. One of the conference themes this year is accelerating user adoption. Having notable icons from the F500 executive board room will go far to lower the barriers of trial and experimentation with 2.0 alternatives.

I’ll be at the conference from Sunday to Wednesday. I hope to see many of you there. Please drop me a note or a comment here to let me know if you’re attending. Many thanks to all the folks on the panels I helped arrange.

Photo credits: Jeckman on flickr and Alex Dunne on flickr.

A stark reality check

According to Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University and author of “The Dumbest Generation”, leisure reading among American 15-to-17-year-olds fell from 18 minutes a day in 1981 to seven in 2003. Electronic media, of one sort or another, now occupy every spare moment.

Mr Bauerlein fears that, far from opening new vistas for learning and awareness, digital technology has fostered a level of public ignorance that now threatens not just our competitive wellbeing but our democracy as well.

To some extent, government statistics bear him out. Proficiency scores in reading, writing, science and mathematics for American teenagers in their last year of high school all fell between 1992 and 2005. Only one in three children left high school able to read proficiently. Only one in four could write a coherent paragraph.

Tech.view | From literacy to digiracy | Economist.com

Sopan Shewale rewiewed Wikipatterns last week. The review is posted on Facebook, so I can’t link directly to it, but the full text is below:

This is a must read book for you if you are responsible for Knowledge Management Group/Infrastructure/Content.

This book gives all possible solutions/tricks if you want to promote knowledge management system/solution using one of the wiki(open source like TWiki-http://twiki.org or commercial enterprise wiki’s) available in the market.

The book also gives idea on choosing WikiChampion - also talks about patterns which are also available on http://www.wikipatterns.com (Stewart is the main brain behind site).

I was responsible for Knowledge Management infrastructure for some time in my company - this book would have added huge value if would have got the copy of this book last year While reading the book, I was able to relate every line with my experience I had gone through while working with the group.

I suggest - who should be reading this book? - if you are a Knowledge Worker, if you are responsible for implementing any package which is used by more than one user in your company - you must read this book. One should look at tool as tool and give more importance to the processes which help your business and get work done from the tools instead of talking more about the tools.

Clay Shirky gave a speech at a Web 2.0 conference a few weeks ago that made an entertaining connection between societal transformations in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the 19th century, there was a sudden shift from rural to urban life that was so wrenching that scores of people needed to drink heavily to cope - gin as the critical technology for the industrial revolution. Only after the “collective bender” did people wake up and build the “institutional structures” we associate with the industrial revolution today -  he lists libraries, museums, democracy, broad education.

As you could probably guess from the title of this post, Shirky then claims that the sitcom is the 20th century equivilent of gin. Underlying this argument is that shortly after WW II a whole whack of people suddenly found themselves with a lot of free time - something they’d never had to manage before. In turn, they panicked and watched sitcoms for 50 years or so. He then goes on to effectively argue that, as a society, we are coming out of the collective “bender” - of 200 Billion hours a year watching TV in the U.S. alone - to use that “free time” for something more productive. The age of participation.

I don’t want to go too much further into his details then that, but rather stay at this level and focus on what is becoming one of the more interesting questions of the day. (more…)

Wow. Some things are better left unsaid, but since Nicholas Negroponte, embattled founder of the One Laptop Per Child project, said it, I'll quote it:

When I talk to people and tell them we can run Windows, they are very impressed. You pass a sort of virility test.

Until you're emasculated by ceding control of the project to Microsoft, which has a long practice of bullying the hardware vendors who carry its Windows operating system. As for being proud that he runs Windows, why? Since when has it been hard to do that? I guess if you set your sights low enough....

But then Negroponte really crams his foot in his mouth, arguing that he needed the open-source community to get started, but only to do the early heavy lifting to pave the way for Microsoft:

...

EnterpriseDB is sponsoring a survey to track which open-source databases people use. Make your voice heard: Vote today. It takes less than 30 seconds to answer, and covers such questions as why you use an open-source database, with which operating system do you use it, etc.

I've now fixed the two broken links in the post "If you have missed out on these reports...".

During my morning reading, I happened upon this verse from Ecclesiastes:

1 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:...

2 a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted....

It made me think of the ongoing debate around open-source business models (illustrated well in a recent post by Savio and perhaps more so in the comments section to that post), kicked up by MySQL's recent decision to offer closed extensions to its core (100 percent open source) database, but one that has been simmering for a long time. MySQL is essentially saying, "We've spent a decade planting. We'd like to reap a little of what we've sown now."

MySQL is doing this right. It has focused on adoption first, and has committed to keeping the source of that adoption open source. But in its next phase, perhaps it demonstrates an ideal open source-based business model. Or rather, a phased approach to growing an open-source business...?

...

Most everyone knows that Yahoo, Google, and many Web 2.0 companies built their SaaS offerings using open source software. Yes, they use open source to save licensing costs. Yes, they used open source to develop their services quickly using Linux, Python, PHP and a host of other high-quality components. They also benefit from the improvements these open source components see year after year.

But, does this mean that SaaS represents the best use of open source?  No, not from a customer perspective. In my opinion, many of the discussions I've been reading lately focus on the wrong question. It's not if SaaS and open source are complementary (of course they are) but how do they complement each other and, more importantly, what does this mean for the customer.

Open source is free and SaaS is often free (as in free email and free social networks). But the primary benefit of open source isn't cost savings, it's choice (to a CIO this means "mitigating risk"). Users of open source can be assured that their data or content sitting in an application will continue to be usable, even if a commercial vendor drops a service or stops selling software.

SaaS (regardless if it was built using open source software or not) that delivers a proprietary service is still a proprietary solution and that removes customer choice. And, yes, I am equating Google Sites to Microsoft SharePoint in this regard. As a customer I may not care how a solution is built but I absolutely care about choice (and as a CIO I really care about mitigating risk).

Open source software that you install on your own equipment is interesting. It gives me choice but at the cost running it myself. But, open source software provided as SaaS is downright compelling because I get the advantages of both SaaS and open source. Someone else takes care of it and I retain choice.