The latest from our blogs
Enterprise 2.0 Camp - Toronto
Enterprise 2.0 Camp is happening in Toronto on November 7th. Don’t miss it.
We will be talking about what’s changing in enterprise software and culture.
Intranets under-used, research finds
“According to the research, document management, e-learning, and contact management were the most prominent intranet tools and Microsoft Office formats the most prominent file format. Intranet features typically revolved around staff announcements and messaging but the list was varied and included documentation and forms, blogs and wikis, phonebooks and directories, weather and menus and even bus timetables.However, despite the high amount of organisations that believe their intranets are massively under-utilised, 86pc of survey participants indicated that intranet will become more important in the near future. The report found that staff collaboration is the main driver for intranet development.“
UnSpacers
John Green invited me down to meet the guys at Unspace.
They are a great, tight knit group of developers and designers, with a fantastic office space too. Their model and way of approaching web work reminded me a lot of our early days at silverorange. They exuberance for their agility and rapid prototyping was a big shot of Deja Vu. Thier business model, a massive partnership of sorts, is also how we used to do things, and silverorange still does.
They are also probably one of the best rails shops you could find right now. Their developers and designers are happy, productive, people. What more could you ask for?
Office 2.0
Tom and I will be heading to the Office 2.0 Conference. Leila will be speaking, and I am looking forward to that. It will be nice to see what other people are thinking about this space, especially people who’s businesses have very little to do with Office/Enterprise tools (their speakers list seems to have a lot of people like that — but I assume that is their point?).
What is a New Human Enterprise?
Stowe Boyd recently emailed us to ask about what we are doing with Firestoker. He is the exchange:
Stowe: What do you mean by Enterprise 2.0 ?
Jevon: We started building a tool we called “Sandbox” over three years ago when we saw that a consulting client of ours was ready to change some big parts of how they do business. They are a reasonably large organization with thousands of people spread across North America, and they were starting to get bogged down trying to make decisions from head office.
They went from Enterprise 1.0 to 2.0 [New human Enterprise -j] by providing a space for all of their employees and contractors to share and learn from each other. They had used other tools before, expensive ERP and CRM tools, but those tools kept them in Enterprise 1.0, and that didn’t change their bottom line.
From a business standpoint, we see Enterprise 2.0 as being about a shift in how you treat decision-making and innovation. We have read the academic papers and read the magazine articles, but until we built a tool that allowed this level of collaboration and decentralization, we didn’t have a way to put it into practice.
Stowe: You mention “socially-focused collaboration” in the job posting I saw in your recent email. Could you elaborate?
Jevon: “socially-focused collaboration” is one of the core exercises of becoming “Enterprise 2.0″ . In the last few years the consumer web has undergone a dramatic change thanks to a new world of innovations known we have come to call “web 2.0″. Blogging and all the other easy-to-use, user-generated content technologies have resulted in a major change in how many users expect to participate on the web.
Simultaneously, other innovations in harnessing mass intelligence including tagging, social networking, and standards like RSS have made it easier to filter all of this new content. Each of these social media tools has made it easier for consumers to connect to the content and people that matter to them.
We have seen a major gap in thinking about internal collaboration within the enterprise, and we have begun to address that need through the use of these tools. What we are attempting to do with the Firestoker project is to build out, piece by piece, an integrated and web-base social media platform that helps businesses small and large solve everyday business problems. With each tool we roll out, the overall ambition is to enable every participant to be better informed, better connected or better able to efficiently collaborate on particular daily work activities.
There are a few definitions of Enterprise 2.0 floating around right now, but we believe that it is more about that central shift than anything else.
Stowe: What enterprise issues does the planned project address?
Jevon: I wrote a blog entry in 2003 I called “Break the Silence” (reposted: firestoker.com/blog/archives/4 ) where I said:
The exchange of ideas in many present day organizations is quite dysfunctional. The mere act of sharing an idea between levels on the hierarchy is akin to a direct command, and sharing ideas on the peer level will often result in complete silence around the table. We develop “spirals of silence” in which we create norms, procedures and ideologies all centered around having a gentlemanly silence.
and that was one of the first bits of pain we identified. Knowledge isn’t the only thing that is lost inside most organizations. Ambition, Empathy, and Passion are all things that are even harder to capture. It is interesting that one of the side effects of creating a more socially connected workplace is not only the prospect of higher productivity but also greater employee loyalty and a higher level of commitment to the collective mission.
Static intranets and traditional tools of emails and manuals published pdfs have their place, but humans also have a need to DO. To create, to change, to understand. By incorporating some of the tools of our Web 2.0 world, and we focus them a little more on these natural and human needs, then we hope that we can really drive new efficiencies and enable innovative thinking within the enterprise.
Shopify
Three guys from Ottawa (about 4 hours from us) have been working on Shopify.com which is a brilliant approach to building e-commerce sites. Shopify will lower the barrier to starting an online business much in the same way that eBay did.
Telling Stories
“User Stories” are nothing new in the world of software design. The iterative and detailed “stories” that they tell have been used mostly by Extreme Programmers for a long time now. Ideally, the customer would write these stories. A few sentences to describe what the software should do for them in some situation, and more often then now, we would use that story to hash out how long it would take us to implement this requirement. Usually culminating in 5-8 pages of additional documentations and graphs.
Building and designing Firestoker has been different. We have decided to write Stories About Users. Each interaction, or goal, is a chapter in a real story that explores the implications of each feature. From social, organizational, policy and personal points of view, our hope is to find out what components and features of our software will really make a difference to the user, and when we have them in a story format, they are much easier to share with others outside of our organization. The Story was the first standard humans have every created, and we remain fully standards compliant.
I will start to post some of our Stories About Users here as they are ready for mass consumption.
Fun community forming: Frappr
While I haven’t been able to get my mind around the shameless borrowing of the Flickr brand icons and image, Frappr has been a fun way for me to waste an hour today. It is very focused on creating groups, and having them members of those groups identify themselves on a Google Map, using the typical Google map pins and bubbles.
I am sure they have more planned, but right now Frappr leaves it at that. There are no real “sticky” features that will make this into a Flickr of groups. Frappr lacks the ongoing participation of great group forming tools.
What is Firestoker? - The Idea
One of the most frequent questions I have been hearing has been what exactly is the idea behind Firestoker?
Firestoker is really the cross section of four ideas about how people work best (space to talk, space to think, space to play, and space to learn), which boils down to conversation, and safe spaces.
There are millions of people out there who work day to day in jobs that reward them with almost nothing. A paycheck, a Christmas Party, the occasional chance to raise some money for a charity. Some of us have never experienced that, but many do.
We know, from all sorts of research and by just thinking about it, that unfulfilled people can’t do a good job. It is literally impossible. If there is a space, where everyone from the CEO to the front end customer service staff can talk, openly and on the same level, we believe an organization can improve more rapidly and more effectively than through any other method, process or theory.
This isn’t a bunch of theory for us either. We began in the consulting world. Working with companies to help “make things work better”. We tried not to act like consultants, we didn’t claim to know their business better than they did, or to hold some magic key, and we certainly never used the typical fear tactics of most of the other consultants we ran into along the way.
We only claimed one thing: If our client (a CEO, a VP, a President usually) could check their ego at the door, and admit that they had no answers in comparison to what they could learn from their own people, then they could succeed. The easiest way to do that was to create a space on the web where everyone in their organization could talk about what they knew, and what they were learning. We called it The Sandbox and now it is Firestoker.
The Firestoker Project is our way of making that software available to organizations who are ready. We have always maintained that software should be cheap, easy and open, and we are going to do our best to make it all three.