Planet Enterprise 2.0

While I’ve been busy in Europe this past week, speaking at International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 (Varese, Italy) and The New Knowledge Forge (Porto, Portugal), and meeting to accept papers and set the program for WikiSym 2008, there’s been no shortage of excellent online coverage:

Marco Frassoni wrote a summary of the talks in Varese, and called me “father of Wikipatterns” which is quite flattering! He summarized the key points from my talk, as well as those of Laurence Lock Lee, Emanuele Quintarelli, and David Terrar.

Gielle Lelli (english translation - original post in Italian) also blogged about the presentations:

Throughout the presentation we were glued to listen sharing, wikis, new and unexplored spaces and… security. Finally, beautiful presentation and a couple of links: WikiPatterns and GrowYourWiki. (then slideshare, Twitter, post today Stewart)

Fernando Moreira (english translation - original post in Portuguese) wrote about the presentations at The New Knowledge Forge, and his post focuses on a theme that emerged - whether Wikipedia has dominated and skewed peoples’ understanding of what a wiki is.

Skilful Minds wrote about my recent posts on Wachovia’s efforts to grow wiki use through mutual mentoring.

Hot Debate on the .wiki TLD Question

Luca Perugini writes in response to my post asking if we need a .wiki Top-Level Domain, and says emphatically yes!

on the same way we have a .tv TLD I believe we need a .wiki TLD.

Someone can disagree with me saying “oh, wiki it’s just another tool, we don’t need a TLD!”.

But Wiki it’s not just a tool.
It’s a new work style!
A Wiki it’s more related with social side of labour, it’s not just a software tool.
On Wiki You can see just another slice of code, but there’s more inside!

There’s quite a debate in the comments on my post asking about .wiki - some people think it’s a great idea, and others just think it will lead to more confusion. Keep your responses coming!

IntranetBlog.ru Interview

I was recently interviewed by Natalia Shvetsova of IntranetBlog.ru, and the interview has just been published. Original Article (Russian), Translation (English)

Photo credit: keepthebyte

ICANN, the Internet’s primary oversight agency, has voted to allow new top-level domains (TLDs). This could mean a massive expansion beyond the original .com, .net, and .org TLDs, and country specific TLDs like .co.uk, .ca, .pl, and .de, and that raises a timely question - should one of those new TLDs be .wiki?

Building Greater Awareness

It could build greater awareness of wikis, and their uses beyond Wikipedia, especially in an organizational context. There’s a general misconception that Wikipedia is what a wiki is, and we need to do a better job educating people about the wide range of wiki uses, such as: project management, building documents, managing meeting agendas, minutes, and action items, etc.

Is it Necessary?

But, is it really necessary to identify a site as a wiki? As wikis become embedded into the fabric of more and more websites, it seems reasonable to ask whether those sites would specifically call out the presence of a wiki using a .wiki address. Also, it would likely be difficult to ensure that a site using the .wiki TLD really is a wiki, but this isn’t a showstopper by any means.

So should there be a .wiki TLD? What do you think? Would you use .wiki? Let’s get a debate going in the comments!

Pete Fields of Wachovia recently discussed his firm’s Enterprise 2.0 adoption efforts with Paul McDougall of InformationWeek.

The company is growing use of wikis, blogs, social networking, and instant messaging, but it’s also making use of its most valuable long term asset - it’s people. The company is working to retain younger workers by directly soliciting their input on these new technologies, and pairing them with senior staffers in a unique twist on mentoring:

Fields said that many of corporate America’s young workers’ engagement levels “fall off the table” after about a year on the job because “we give them no means of input.”

To change that, Wachovia is giving its Gen Y workers a role in helping its Enterprise 2.0 makeover succeed. Younger employees are assigned to teach senior staffers about the benefits of using collaborative networks.

This is a very smart approach not only for adoption of the new technology tools, but for business experience and know-how as well. Between the two workers one has the technology knowledge, one has the business experience, and both are needed to be successful.

We often talk about how the millennial generation has an advanced grasp of these social and collaborative tools, but just half of the story in my opinion. I see enterprise 2.0 tools not as the exclusive domain of youth, but as a better connector for multiple generations, so that wisdom, tacit knowledge, and business know-how from the experienced can be shared with younger workers.

In return, those younger workers can show their more experienced colleagues how to better organize information with tagging and folksonomy, streamline collaboration using wikis, build online social networks and use them to discover the right people to work with on projects, involve them throughout the process to get a high quality, refined final product, and inform broader communities in a conversational context using blogs.

To make this vision a reality, we have to draw in as many people as possible from all generations, industries, locations, and levels of experience.

I’m the first-ever guest blogger for the Wikinomics Blog, and will be writing a four-part series over the next several weeks. The first post is published, so have a read and let me know your thoughts!

In the next post, I’ll talk about the rampant “culture of interruptions” in today’s workplace, and what you can do about it. Then, I’ve got some great topics lined up for the posts after that one - but you’ll have to check back to see what they are! I’ll blog here to let you know when each new guest post is published.

International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 is underway here in Italy, and I presented “Cultivating wikis to change the enterprise and improve the bottom line” this morning.

Luis Suarez posed an excellent running summary of my talk this morning on Twitter. (Luis’ main Twitter account is @elsua; the summary is on his conference specific account @elsuacon). There’s no good tool to display a specific set of tweets so here are a few highlights from his summary:

• @slmader JUST did my pitch! Showing the example of how to work agendas through a wiki vs. email! YAY!!! Loving it!
• 6 degrees of collaboration: 1. Organise, streamline, inform, involve; 2. Virtual extension of your workplace;
• 3. Adoption takes time; 4. A small, successful pilot builds confidence;
• 5. Start together - wiki with a purpose; 6. Share as much as possible … This and much over over at ikiw.org @slmader’s blog!
• What a GREAT session from Stewart. He did set a nice background for my upcoming pitch & really really worth while going through!
• His deck is one of the best I have seen on wiki adoption with some concrete use cases and recommendations on how to get started!

Here’s another summary of all the tweets referencing my talk, created using Summize, a great tool that lets you search for twitter posts by topic, person, hashtag, etc.

The current issue of 7thFloor, an italian business magazine, includes an interview with the speakers from the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0.

In the interview:

Laurence Lock Lee explains how social network analysis reveals the connections between people and the resulting knowledge distribution network.

Thomas Vander Wal explains folksonomy - using social taging to organize knowledge based on interconnections between people.

Ran Shribman says that companies can tap into the skills people are developing from their use of consumer Web 2.0 tools by using similar tools behind the firewall.

Luis Suarez outlines the advantages for companies that encourage social media use at work - a more responsive organization, better able to engage millenial generation knowledge workers, and involve experienced workers who hold a wealth of knowledge.

Stewart Mader compares organizational and public wikis (Wikipedia vs. enterprise wiki), offers several examples of organizations actively using wikis today, and outlines the main business drivers and use cases inside organizations.

Read the full article:

• Enterprise 2.0: La Rivoluzione dei Social Media entra nelle Imprese (Italian)
• Enterprise 2.0: The Revolution of the Social Media enters the Enterprise (English)

Grow Your Wiki is going on the road (again)! I’ll be in Europe next week to speak at two events: International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 and The New Knowledge Forge.

International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 - Varese, Italy, 25 June

Università dell’Insubria and OpenKnowledge are hosting the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 to give Entrepreneurs and Top Management, Human Resource management, and Commercial and Marketing Directors a look at how to increase efficiency, transparency, employee engagement, and conversational interaction with customers, business partners, and the community at large.

The New Knowledge Forge - Porto, Portugal, 30 June

Late next week, I’ll be in Porto, Portugal for WikiSym 2008 planning meetings, followed by the one-day symposium An International Discussion of Work Towards The New Knowledge Forge.

The Symposium will be held on Monday, 30 June from 2-7 PM at Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto/The Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto.

We’ll discuss the future of social software in organizations, new ways to gather, analyze, and disseminate knowledge, and the impact of improved knowledge sharing for your employees, customers, and the broader community.

The incredible potential for wikis, blogs, and other social software tools has only just begun to be felt by the organizations that have embraced them, and so many others are just beginning to look at these tools and see their potential. I’m looking forward to this symposium.

Do you use a wiki to support a software engineering project? Have you integrated a wiki with other software engineering tools (IDE, configuration management, etc.)? Want to share how you use a wiki in your software development project, and get ideas, tips, and best practices from others?

The call for Papers for the Third Workshop on Wikis for Software Engineering is now open. The Wikis4SE workshop will be held in conjunction with WikiSym 2008, on September 8, 2008, and will include short paper presentations and workgroup discussions.

Interested in submitting a paper? Experience reports and position papers of not more than six pages are invited. The submission deadline is July 31, and notification of acceptance will go out August 11.

I’m on my way home from Web Content 2008. I first spoke at this conference last year, and It’s wonderful to see an already great conference get even better. The conference sold out for the first time this year! Scott Abel and Michael Silverman have done an excellent job putting together a conference that is refreshingly focused on what people are actually doing, not what the Web 2.0 insiders are pushing as the latest and greatest.

The leading edge is necessary - and what’s happening there is exciting - but many organizations are still at the point where they’re getting to know blogs, starting to hear about wikis, and struggling to understand how these tools can make a positive impact on their work. Conferences like Web Content 2008 that focus on demystifying Web 2.0 and demonstrating good, practical examples are an excellent venue for people to get their questions answered and find the products and services they need to be successful.

One of the best sessions I attended was More Than Just Another Pretty Face by Charles Cooper, Vice President of The Rockley Group. He talked about the importance of getting the structure right for your website, and using good visual design to make it bth usable and attractive. His advice was timeless because a good website - whether it’s a static site marketing a product or service, a blog of any type (personal, corporate, news, topical, etc.), or a wiki used for collaboration with clients and teams - can and should adhere to these principles:

• concentrates on the needs of the user
• loads quickly
• doesn’t have a splash screen
• clear purpose
• easy to navigate
• labels, titles, and buttons must be clearly named
• easy to find information

Looking to hire someone great for a wiki or content management job? Want to get hired for an exciting new gig? Grow Your Wiki now offers job listings!

The new job board is available today, and already has some listings ready for you.

If you’d like to post an open position, I have a special offer: use the coupon code wiki to get one free job posting. This offer expires June 25, so act now! You can use the board to list any type of position: full-time, part time, contract, freelance, consulting, etc.

There’s a new Jobs link in the navigation bar at the top of every page that will take you to the job board. There’s also a job listing section in the right sidebar, so whenever you’re browsing articles, don’t forget to check out the listings and see what’s available!

Dave Snowden has written an excellent piece, aptly titled: If you try and set targets for knowledge sharing you have failed to understand the subject:

Knowledge is a voluntary act, if people trust each other they will share. If they work together and create interdependencies then they will share. If the context requires it even political rivals will share. Good management (including knowledge management) is about creating the right sort of environment and interactions. Creating a set of explicit targets is an abrogation of management responsibility not its assumption.

Need I say more? Well, one more thing - that line up above about creating interdependencies is the most important key to what you can and should do. Instead of saying you want 10 documents on the wiki per week, spend 15 or 20 minutes showing your project team how to collaboratively build documents on the wiki, and before long they’ll have a lot more than 10 documents on the wiki.

Here are a few photos from the plane and hotel tonight - I’m in Chicago for Web Content 2008.

Like a lot of people, I was caught off guard last Friday afternoon by the news of Tim Russert’s untimely (and that’s an understatement, if ever there was one) death. Meet The Press has been a weekly mainstay for me for as long as I can remember - first on TV on Sunday, then by podcast Monday - and I’d usually watch the podcast a couple of times. It was that good.

No yelling. No back-and-forth, tit-for-tat, superficial arguments. Even if I disagreed with a guest’s views, I’d still want to see the interview, because Russert engaged them in a substantive discussion, based his questioning on facts over agenda or ideology, and gave viewers a chance to understand how Washington works and make informed decisions.

And I always liked how, after an intense interview, Russert would bring things back down to earth by closing the show with small talk about the day’s football games and a plug for his beloved Buffalo Bills. Because at the end of the day, when the arguments are over, debates settled, and work done, it’s the pastimes like shared love of sports, music, and family that bring us together.

Yesterday morning, Russert’s son Luke was interviewed on the NBC Today show. Here’s somebody who just graduated college, celebrated with his family just a week ago, and now he has to wrestle with one of the hardest things that can happen in life - the loss of a parent.

Here’s the thing: he’s a spitting image of his father. He was every bit as confident, poised, and at ease on camera as his dad.

Luke spoke for 15 minutes about his dad with remarkable poise. He never lost his composure, not even when he was talking about being on the set of “Meet the Press” on Sunday and touching his dad’s empty chair — a moment captured in a moving photograph by The Associated Press.

“I’m going to keep that chair forever,” Luke told Lauer. “That’s my chair now.”

At Wachovia, Enterprise 2.0 tools like wikis, blogs, and social networking, as well as instant messaging are being championed by e-business director Pete Fields. He discussed how the company is taking a phased approach to introducing the tools, starting with a pilot in December 2007:

Wachovia is rolling out the project in stages. It launched a pilot program with about 1,000 workers in December, extended it to 10,000 in February, and had expected to make the environment available to all of its 120,000 employees by the end of last month.

Wikis are one of the most popular of the newly available tools:

Among the more popular tools in Wachovia’s Enterprise 2.0 portal are the wikis, according to Fields. The bank’s first effort was a wiki designed to capture and define the numerous three letter acronyms used throughout its operations.

A Careful and Gradual Approach:

Ultimately, Wachovia plans to extend its Enterprise 2.0 network to customers and business partners, but carefully and gradually.

Wachovia’s approach is much more likely to bring long term benefits, because they’re taking a careful approach to such significant change. Unlike the enterprise software rollouts that go from “0 to 60″ right away and place significant scaling pressures on IT, training, support, and the users themselves, the phased approach gives people time to experiment with the tools, and find the uses that significantly improve the way they work - uses that will stand the test of time.

If you haven’t submitted the Wikipatterns.com survey, there’s still time. We have decided to keep the survey open until Saturday 14th June, so we would really appreciate it if you could take 5 minutes to give us your feedback. You should have received one more email in the last 24 hours with the link to complete the survey - that’s the last email we’ll be sending you regarding this survey.

Note: In section 2 of the survey we ask about fellow Wikipatterns.com users you know or have connected with. If you haven’t connected with anyone yet, don’t worry. Just select yourself from the list so that you can complete the survey. Thanks!

Howard Lenos writes about the 90-9-1 rule as a benchmark for assessing participation in online communities. Here’s a comment I left on his post that looks at how the rule changes inside organizations:

One point about the 90-9-1 rule that I see in my consulting work inside organizations: the ratio is quite different. The ratio trends toward 60% knowledge champions (people who contribute most often), so the focus needs to be on the 40% that contribute occasionally or only passively read content.

There’s work to be done here, but the existing structure in organizations - unlike online communities on the open web - helps influence people to become more active contributors. For instance, if everyone on your team is using the wiki for meeting agendas & minutes, and you’re the lone holdout, the others will encourage you to use the wiki too. They’ll do it b/c they don’t want that one email they have to deal with from you when everyone else is better connected thanks to the wiki.

The key to success is how they do it - if they’re hard on you for being slow to switch, you might dig your heels in an refuse to succumb. On the other hand, if they show you how to contribute, and give you some direct support, that may be all you needed to get started in the first place.

There’s a lot of excellent, practical discussion taking place right now in the Enterprise 2.0 Conference Community site. I’m following two threads in particular: 

• Building the Business Case for E2.0  
• Barriers to Adoption for Enterprise 2.0 Initiatives?

Regarding barriers to adoption, Sage Advice on Wiki Adoption: The Pitfalls is a recent post with my take on how to avoid and overcome the barriers to wiki adoption, many of which are the same barriers to adoption of the larger Enterprise 2.0 idea. Nate Nash & Jay Hariani recently wrote about their work internally at BearingPoint. Jon Mell outlines his 9 principles for wiki/Enterprise 2.0 adoption.

The wiki enables CIA staffers to better organize and securely share information, keep track of what’s known and who found it, and avoid duplicate efforts so they can focus on filling in what they don’t yet know.

Doug Belzer writes in Washington Technology about the CIA’s internal wiki use, and the effort it’s taken for internal proponents like Sean Dennehy and Don Burke to overcome skepticism and demonstrate its value.

The CIA was initially skeptical about whether a wiki was even right for the intelligence community. Burke says the initial reaction went something like this:

“We just went through 9/11, through Iraq, and now this guy is saying we can go and make edits in the middle of the night on a wiki page?”

But the agency found that many intelligence staffers wanted tools that would help them work more closely, share and organize the bits and pieces of information they gather, and put together the pieces of larger puzzles they’re working to solve.

One feature that was attractive to the intelligence community is the back-and-forth debate that happens among editors of encyclopedia entries. A place for intelligence officers to debate topics fits well with the way they are used to working, Burke said.

In Intellipedia, edits to an entry are dated and attributed to the person who made the edit. That kind of record is important to agencies such as the CIA, Dennehy said. “In the intelligence community, we are often asked, ‘What did you know, and when did you know it?’ ” he said.

Access Permissions: Unclassified, Classified, and Top Secret

Information in the agency’s wiki, dubbed Intelipedia, is organized based on the same three levels of secrecy that are used anywhere else intelligence is stored:

Intellipedia exists in three networks: unclassified, classified and top secret. It allows anyone with access to those networks to read the information but only lets authenticated users make edits.

Aside from the obviously more dramatic labels used in the intelligence community, this is not all that different from a business organizing information in the wiki based on departments like design, engineering, marketing, sales, & support, or a university organizing information in the wiki based on categories like courses, research labs, and administrative departments.

Greater Adoption More About Culture Than Technology

Dennehy says that wiki use is still in its earliest phases, and the biggest challenge is convincing people that there’s value in using the wiki:

At this point, getting greater adoption is more a cultural problem than a technology problem. Emphasizing that Web 2.0 is a good way to share important data is one way to gain new adopters, Dennehy said. It is also effective at limiting duplicated efforts. If one user sees that information about a topic already exists, he doesn’t waste time re-authoring that same information. But if the user has a new perspective on the topic, he can add that information.

Excellent interview with Clay Shirky in CIO Insight on the growth of social technologies in business:

We’re used to the CIO being presented with two lists: Product A has 17 features, and Product B has 32 features, so B must be better.

With social tools, it is very often the opposite. I see this with my students in a seminar on the production of social media tools. They come back and say, “We took this out for user testing, and the users ask for fewer features.” That’s a persistent pattern.

On simplicity driving adoption of social tools:

The cognitive model is to treat the computer not as a box, but a door. It’s something you need to get through to get to the value on the other side. People don’t want a door with 32 different kinds of handles; they want a relatively transparent view of the other people who are using the system.

The software that’s become most ubiquitous has launched with almost no features—that’s true for the launch of Blogger, the launch of Twitter, the launch of wikis. Now you’ve got blogs that have lots of features because they’ve become mature, but the basic idea of what a blog does was so simple, and it was that simplicity that drove it.

From an architectural standpoint, software that’s simple on day one, and highly extensible with plugins & extensions is at the heart of this principle because people can always begin with the simplicity, whether they start today, next month, or next year. Then, as they become proficient users, they’ll realize what additional features they need, and can add them via plugins.

That, in my opinion, is the biggest change Enterprise 2.0 brings to the way people think about using software tools to reach business goals.