20110518-1 ARMA Central Iowa Intro

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[twitter]Introduction to Web 2.0[/twitter]

[twitter]@gapingvoid’s Snake Oil 2.0 makes an appearance: http://gapingvoid.com/2006/09/04/snake-oil/ [/twitter]

Now let’s turn to some definitions. And we begin with Web 2.0. The first references to Web 2.0 occurred as early as 1999, but it wasn’t until Tim O’Reilly’s inaugural Web 2.0 Conference in 2004 that the term really started to stick. Tim has redefined Web 2.0 on a number of occasions and seems to be happiest with this one. I won’t read the entire thing to you, but I do want to focus your attention on the last line: “Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.” This really started with fax – the first person to buy a fax was pretty gullible, no? So was the second. But once that tipping point hit, fax became an amazing business tool that many companies today consider a critical part of their communications infrastructure. Amazon doesn’t work nearly as well without recommendations, and “People who bought this also bought…..”, and lists, and all the other social functionality embedded in it. Wikipedia with only one author is Microsoft Word with a bad user interface. [twitter]Tim O’Reilly’s definition of Web 2.0: build apps that get better the more people use them. http://is.gd/87biX [/twitter]

It’s also true that Web 2.0 is profoundly changing the way we work. You can work on a computer at your work, home, or Internet café, a laptop at the airport, a tablet PC at the local starbucks, or on your iPhone in a pub. It generally requires Web access, though even this is starting to change, but the tools are lightweight enough and the computers are both mobile enough and powerful enough to let you “work where you want, when you want, and be able to conduct real business.“[twitter]Web 2.0:work where you want, when you want, and be able to conduct real business. – blognation Canada[/twitter]

Andrew McAfee is generally accepted to have coined the term Enterprise 2.0 in 2006. His definition has gone through a number of refinements; in May 2006 he came up with this definition for Enterprise 2.0 2.0 (his term). [twitter]Andrew McAfee: E2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.[/twitter]

And the most recent buzzword seems to be cloud computing. The US National Institute for Standards and Technology, or NIST, defines cloud computing as a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned. It’s a lengthy definition (and there’s more to it) but it can be summarized to some extent by comparing it to your power or water. You sign up, you use what you need and pay for it. For cloud computing, you sign up, you consume what resources you need – computing power, storage, applications – and pay for them. Cloud computing services are available in public, private, and hybrid models. Like the names suggest, public models are available to anyone who needs it, where private models are cloud-type architectural models but installed inside the firewall for increased security and control. Hybrid models use both – public for less sensitive data and private for more. We should note that while security is clearly a concern, it is not accurate to say that public cloud computing cannot be secure. We’ll talk more about that later. Pricing generally follows utility or subscription models – in other words, you either pay by the X, whether X is GB of storage or something else; or you pay a monthly subscription fee for a certain level of capabilities. [twitter] NIST: cloud computing enables on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned[/twitter]

Ray Sims described Web 2.0 in his Learning Connections blog and I think it summarizes the concept very well. It’s All About Me:User generated content – many of us want to be authors, but it’s been too expensive and the tools haven’t been there. Diversity –> the long tail provides as much choice as you care for. Choice in software applications –> Users may not be as constrained to use what IT provides because the barrier to adoption is so much lower. Informal (self-directed, lifelong) learningand My Networks.All the people I interact with: colleagues and co-workers, personal connections, complete strangers with similar interests half a world away are all available to me. The plus is that this enables a wealth of collaboration, of synergy, and of discovery. The other side of this coin is an increasing need to manage reputation – mine and yours – and to build relationships of trust between us. It’s Open,Radical transparency. Immediate feedback, through comments to my blog, posts on your blog, Twitterings, etc. And it’s an outward-focused conversation. This doesn’t necessarily mean public; but it does mean that siloes of information become increasingly difficult to sustain. Emergent,InnovativePerpetual beta –> never complete and frequently changesLight weightFast……to get up and running…and easy to use…to find and make connections with others…response to questions from social network…time to value…to appear and (sometimes also) fast to become irrelevantand Always On.Global24 x 7 x 365 1/4Mobile devices and upcoming ubiquitous wireless connectivitySoftware as a Service (SaaS) – work where you need to. [twitter]Ray Sims on Web 2.0: It’s all about me, and my networks; it’s open, emergent, Fast, and always on.[/twitter]

During my professional lifetime, I have seen at least 4 major enterprise IT transformations, and they seem to be occurring with increasing acceleration. When I first came into the workforce, the enterprise IT norm was centered on mainframe computers focused on batch-processed financial applications. This was the era of Burroughs and Univac and NCR and Control Data and Honeywell. This era was soon eclipsed by the rise of minicomputers.Minis were themselves eclipsed by the PC revolution, stitched together in Local Area Networks. Steroids in the form of the internet changed everything about how we connected PCs together distributed documents and information around our organizations. And then along came Google and our expectations about enterprise IT and simplicity of use morphed once again.

The challenges here are enormous. Expectations of Enterprise IT are rising. The business, still reeling from the crash of 2008, is questioning the rigidity and cost of legacy systems. The focus of IT is changing from a traditional focus on standardizing and automating back-end manual processes – a focus on CONTROL – to a focus on empowering and connecting knowledge workers and improving knowledge worker productivity and innovation. in the world of Systems of Engagement – no one on the user side cares about any of this. However, because these systems are being used by enterprises, they will inevitably be subject to the same legal and social restrictions as traditional enterprise content, and therein lies the rub. Today that rub is significantly limiting endorsement and adoption of consumer-style communication and collaboration facilities around the world, and it will continue to do so until the content management industry and its customers develop protocols and policies to address its issues.

[twitter]Now let’s look at the benefits of Web 2.0[/twitter]

One of the key benefits of these tools is that they are often easier to use than their more traditional counterparts. Here you see Google Docs, which offers a much simpler interface than Microsoft Word 2007. Google Docs and its counterparts do not offer nearly as much functionality as Word does – but that might be a feature rather than a drawback. Instead of spending a lot of time on formatting, selecting the perfect font, etc., this streamlined interface lets the user focus more on the writing. The tool doesn’t get in the way as much as it might with other applications. This is especially true when it comes to collaboration, developing knowledge bases, etc. [twitter] Benefit of Web 2.0: Less tool, more work – i.e. the tool gets out of the way.[/twitter]

Many of these tools provide better collaboration capabilities. In many organizations, collaboration is done through email, and it works like this: I draft a document and send it out to a group of people to review. Most of them take some time to review it and provide comments back. Some will mark up the document using track changes and send it back as an attachment. Others will make changes without change tracking on and send as an attachment. In both cases the name of the attachment might be changed – or it might not be. Still others will send their comments back in the text of the message, with or without the attachment. And those messages with comments could come back to me, the entire group, or any number of individuals in between.I get all these back and work through consolidating all the changes. I update the draft and send it out for a second review. As additional changes come in, I receive some recommended changes from the initial draft from folks who missed the initial deadline. And so it goes. The only thing I don’t like about this graphic from the folks at Intellipedia is that the email side is still TOO neat – it should have dozens more lines. Contrast this with wiki-based collaboration. Everyone is always looking at the same, and most up-to-date version. All the changes are in one place – and documented as part of the change control process. Users can see what other users are writing and discussion of a particular edit or change can be kept right there with the wiki article for others to see and comment on. It’s just much simpler and more streamlined. [twitter]Better collaboration – for example, wiki vs. email.[/twitter]

Hard cost of the tools are lower – often as low as free. Even those that are not free are frequently within the range of the typical user’s credit card – either corporate or personal. And even enterprise-class capabilities are within range of even smaller organizations thanks to economies of scale of storage and network bandwidth and the open source movement. [twitter]The hard costs of the tools are lower – often as low as free.[/twitter]

The time to implement is negligible – where implementation is required it is typically measured in days or weeks rather than months or years. [twitter]The time to implement is much lower compared to traditional software applications.[/twitter]

And the time to learn the tool is similarly lower than for many traditional software applications. No, you don’t get as many capabilities with Zoho Writer or Google Docs as you do with Microsoft Word 2007 – but many of us see that as a feature, not a bug. [twitter]The time to learn the tool is lower than most traditional software applications.[/twitter]

And the time required to support and administer the tools is much lower. Consider that for most of these tools there’s no such thing as service packs, patches, hot fixes, or even versions to have to implement. For those tools that do offer updates, they are generally done automatically and because they are being rolled out to thousands or even millions of users, bugs get found very quickly. Yes, there are issues with this in terms of potential incompatibilities, particularly where these tools get integrated into business processes. But how is that different from a bad patch from any other vendor – except that your organization first took the time to install it before having to take the time to uninstall it?[twitter] And the time required to support and administer the tools is much lower.[/twitter]

Finally, these tools make it much easier to transfer knowledge. Consider a typical project, run as projects typically are, through a combination of project management software and email. Decisions made by email might only be communicated to those included in a particular message or thread. Those messages are stored in siloes where nobody else can access them. When a new user joins the project, bringing that employee up to speed can be a significant exercise in itself in terms of providing the user access to those decisions, messages, etc. Instead, the project team could set up a blog for those announcements. When a new employee joins the project team it’s a simple matter to have the person start at the beginning of the blog and read through to current. Deliverables and plans could be stored and managed on a wiki, which as we noted earlier would make the current version always available and provide a detailed description of changes over the lifecycle of the deliverable. As team members check in and collaborate with each other a social network or microblogging solution would allow other team members to follow the discussion, know other members are working on, and so forth without getting bogged down in email. [twitter]Knowledge sharing and transfer can be much easier compared to, say, email.[/twitter]

Finally, one of the key benefits to these tools is that they make much more explicit the ways the work actually gets done. Every organization has certain “go-to” people whose expertise and influence is not captured in the org chart. But not everyone knows who those people are, which results in employees spending time recreating the wheel. This has been the mantra of knowledge management for a number of years – as Lew Platt, former CEO of HP, said so succinctly, “If HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times as profitable.”[twitter]”If HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times as profitable.” Lew Platt, former CEO, HP[/twitter]

Many of these tools provide reporting and metrics natively to allow organizations to measure and quantify who knows what, whose work is consistently valued, and who shares. As John Parkinson of TransUnion noted, "It was never very clear to us who the authoritative sources were, who was good at solving problems. Now we can see a lot of that because we're starting to see patterns emerge:- Who follows whom, - Who's the good source of questions, and - Who's the good source of answers.All the things you know by the grapevine, we now have data for.”[twitter] RE: social media value: “All the things you know by the grapevine, we now have data for.” John Parkinson, TransUnion[/twitter]

[twitter]These slides will be posted shortly to: http://www.slideshare.net/jessewilkins8511.[/twitter]

20110518-1 ARMA Central Iowa Intro

Jesse Wilkins

20110518-1 ARMA Central Iowa Intro