Contextual intranets by @roojwright #congressp

I recently posted my notes on the 1st masterclass of the SharePoint conference we organize. The 2nd masterclass of the SharePoint conference is by Andrew Wright. His talk is about ‘contextual intranet’. I'm sharing my summary of the masterclass below. I think I'll also post one or two more posts on the conference itself.
But first Andrew Wright's masterclass about 'contextual intranets'.

What is a contextual intranet?

Wright’s definition is:

An intranet that facilitates the development of content – both qualified (signal) and unqualified (noise) – that supports continuous improvement, efficient operations and employee engagement and delivers this content in a meaningful context to the employee.

Characteristics of the contextual intranet
The contextual intranet exists of the following elements:

1. Content development
2. Business imperatives (continuous improvement, operations (tasks), employee engagement)
3. Content delivery (context provided by meta data, like LinkedIn Today does and Amazon)

Andrews shows with actual examples how business imperatives can be achieved using SharePoint. For instance: by using a SharePoint wiki and ‘related content’ (using look-up fields).

How do you implement a contextual intranet?
Andrew explained how we can achieve a 'contextual intranet. He detailed the following steps:

1. Set a baseline. What do you want to achieve and what is the situation now?
2. Technology (which elements of SharePoint do you need?)
3. Set-up
4. Prototype
5. Roles and tasks
6. Content plan
7. Governance
8. Collaboration

Discussion
We discussed to which extent this list goes for all intranets, not just contextual intranets. We thought there would be more time spent on roles and tasks, and content (tagging) to make contextualization work.

Would you say you have a contextual intranet? If so, let us know how it works and what value it brings to employees and your organization?

Choosing the right social tool - Reflecting on the #SocialNow conference

Many companies are looking into social tools for their internal organization. Lots of others just select what related companies have chosen. Hoping this is the right choice.

As with selecting content management systems, many struggle to select a social platform. There are so many tools out there and they all say they can help you support internal networks. How to choose the right one? Is there a right one? Does the success of a tool elsewhere mean it will also be successful in the company you work for?

The Social Now conference in Porto (June 26-27), organized by Knowman, addressed these questions. And it did so in a unique way. Basically the idea was to have social tool vendors present based on a concrete company case that wanted to move forward in knowledge sharing, idea management and collaborative project work. The vendors were asked to share their approach in 20 minutes and then an expert panel helped the company ask the right questions to the vendors. Many brave vendors presented: Alfresco, Confluence, Microsoft Sharepoint, Oracle, Newsgator, Podio, Teepin, Zyncro, Xwiki, SocialIBIS, Oobian, and Spreadd. 

Also, several expert talks were given:

• Oscar Berg about how social concepts and tools can improve knowledge work
• Ana Neves (also conference organizer) gave two talks: one about selecting social tools and the other about adoption techniques
• Hugo Magalhães helped the audience decide whether to go for Saas or not 
• Joaquín Peña shared the insights from the Spanish Enterprise 2.0 conference
• Lee Bryant closed the converence with a talk about the social organization. 

I think the conference was truly unique and successfully helped the audience gain more perspective in the social tool landscape. There was lots of discussion during the conference in which participants shared their situations and tools they are of have tried. Furthermore the vendors were open about what they are good and less good at and also answered the hard questions in one-on-one's.

What struck me during several presentations was the fact that many vendors address the process-side of work and how their social tools relate and connect processes to networks and vice versa. I think this underlines the fact that the social tool market is maturing. And this approach clearly helped the audience with their adoption questions, because most organizations spend lots of improving processes. Social tools are more than fun, they help get daily work done and improve the overall business. 

Another interesting insight is that Oracle (with Webcenter) and Citrix (with Podio) are taking on Google, Microsoft and IBM. Both are extending their current, more traditional offerings with social tools. 

A final insight: innovation happens at the edges. John Hagel and Seely Brown stress this in The Power of Pull. The Social Now conference proved this to be true. The smaller vendors all had much more innovative approaches to the social space. Take Podio with which users can build their own widgets to get the information or application they need to do their work. Or Spreadd that connects all kinds of tools to a public stream trying to automate as much narration as possible. Or Oobian that semantically analyzes content and connections to provide insights over huge amounts of data. And SocialIBIS that converts your stream for text to speech so you can listen to the stream while on the move. Or Zyncro that translates stream updates in the language you understand. Just to list some of the features of these platforms!

I was curious if this new way to set up a conference would work. I think it did. Most conference are focused on business or IT. This conference took a more integral approach. The conference was well-structured, an impressive list of vendors presented, there was lots of discussion going on during, before and after the program. I really enjoyed it.

What do you think of the concept of this conference? How could this conference be even better?

And are you in the process of selecting a social tool? What’s your approach? 

All the tweets and other posts about the conference can be found here.

Disclaimer: I was master of ceremony of the conference, but did not organize the it.

Location and News(papers), also for Intranet?

The New York Times has an interesting 'experimental projects' group, beta620. ReadWriteWeb recently pointed to an interesting experiment, called Longitude.
Wouldn't it be neat if news items could be browsed through by a map? So you can see what news has been published about the city or country you live in or are interested in? Longitude does just this.

One thing I was wondering is: Is this concept also interesting for the intranet? Could it be valuable to international companies to link the news items and intranet pages to a location? Clearly there are good cases for the combination of location and intranet. Curious to hear your thoughts about this.

Go ahead and play with Longitude. Great stuff for in the weekend if you ask me!

Helping You Filter Streams - Darwin Awareness Engine

I've promised Bill Ives that I'd write a blogpost about Darwin Awareness Engine a long time ago. Finally, here's my post about this new and interesting service. Sorry it took so long...

How do you keep up with the news, tweets, updates and feeds? We live in the wonderful world of information abundance. But many feel overwhelmed by the amount and speed of information. Some even talk about information overload.

I described how I keep up with what's going on in the world and in my area's of interest. But can't it be better?
Yes, it can. This is where all kinds of new(er) solutions pop up. Like Techmeme and Postrank. There's even talk of Web Squared, Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web, which should help us filter through loads of information coming at us. Not just by highlighting 'the best tweets and feeds', but my semantically analyzing and summarizing the information.

The Darwin Awareness Engine fits in this movement. And I think they're doing a good job. I can see why they won several prizes. It works and it's useful.

Bill Ives explains what Darwin Engine is about and what it does here.

Rather than using semantic technology to attempt to enable understanding by a computer, our approach to awareness based on Chaos Theory provides a visualization of results that better enables a person to make more informed decisions about where to look next. Then there are tools that allow for efficient drilling down into relevant details. It builds on a person’s expertise rather than trying to replace it.

You can try it here or built on Twitter here. You'll see it presents the information in tagcloud-like visualizations. It also shows a ticker-tape. By adding and removing terms (attractors) the results can be manipulated.

I used Darwin Engine for some time. I don't use it very often anymore. My experiences are:

• Darwin Engine or Twortex was an extra space for me to watch (besides the streams that I already pay attention to). It was too much for me to also keep going there. I also wonder if this has to do with usability. Are the visualizations visual enough and is the interface self-explanatory enough for users to keep coming back? The biggest challenge for a new service is to get users to integrate it in their workflow.
• I liked the application of the Engine to Twitter, called Twortex. It would be great to flip the standard Twitter timeline with a more visual one like Twortex. Not only on terms but also on my or one of my follower's timeline. I do find Twortex kind of slow. Sometimes is keeps on processing without showing results.
• Related to the previous bullet: I think it would be helpful to have a more visual navigation of my feeds in Google Reader. I'd like to see the traditional feedlist and easily flip to the visual mode. Flipboard and Zite show there a market for more visual navigation.
• As mentioned on the website, Darwin Engine is great for business and competitive intelligence work. And for information management departments. It would be neat to use the Engine on internal company information as well.

I'm curious where Darwin Engine is headed. I hope my remarks are useful to the creators and users  of the Engine.
Have you used Darwin Engine? What are your experiences? Please share your comments or blogposts here.

Social Business Intelligence: The Future of Data-Driven Business Performance by Lee Bryant @leebryant #sbs2011

This talk by Lee Bryant is about data and how it can lead to and improve social business intelligence.

The industrial age model is getting less and less productive. It's still being masked by financials. We also see the limits of the carrot and stick management methods and extrinsic motivation as a way of orchestrating work.

Process is an embedded responsive to prior stupidity (Shirky). It's the opposite of human endeavor which is about pattern matching, sense making, etc.

Social Business is becoming the new mainstream. You can see this happening on the streets (shops saying "follow us on Twitter").

Data should/can drive evolutionary improvement. Social business data and intelligence can create the conditions for businesses to evolve. API's are the sex organs of business evolution then data is the DNA.

Companies are sitting on loads of data. Of which just a small bit should remain confidential.

This is the starting point for social CRM. Eventually it will be just the other way around: customers will hold data about businesses instead of the other way around (VRM, Doc Searls).

This leads to services and models based on real-time analytics, like Klarna.

Data collection costs money, but can be turned into a source of value.

Lee relates to the Open Data movement. Use open data to drive organizational change. E.g. biofeedback, real-time feedback vs retrospective reporting (e.g. radicial transparency through social tools like wiki's) leads to self-management instead of waiting. Just by publicizing the numbers keeps people on-task and makes work game-like.

Vision Dachis/Headshift: Social experience design for network stimulation.

We need to help people cope with the abundance of data. Create data streams that people can capture/view.

Lee foresees apps in the enterprise, looking more like Flipboard than Tweetdeck. We need more of these. And when we got the client-side right, we need to create the filters.

This also implies social media monitoring should be improved heavily. Currently the monitoring tool are not very useful. And the results of monitoring should be turned into actionable insights. This is social analytics, focusing on people listening, understanding and making sense of data.

The future will be about evidence and data in the social business space. We need (more) Marketing Data Engineers.

And that rounds up the Social Business Summit 2011. Comments and corrections on my notes about the Summit are more than welcome.

I really enjoyed the conference. It was well-organized, great speakers, lots of networking and discussion during the breaks. A truly inspiring day.

UPDATE 6 April, 2011: Added picture and links, corrected text.

Enterprise Wolfram Alpha

Nova Spivack of Twine has an interesting post (on Twine) introducing us to Stephan Wolfram's 'Wolfram Alpha'. This is really exciting news and I'm looking forward to get my hands on this new "answer engine".

I still have to think Spivak's post through to really understand what this means for the internet, for search and natural language processing. But, I have a question (for you) without having many answers to this question myself: Can this be used for the enterprise too? If answers to questions can truly be computed, can enterprise-specific questions also be answered using enterprise data (if needed, combined with external world knowledge/data)? Can questions as: why does this part have these specifications, why were they chosen?, be answered? If so, this could be very interesting for companies having loads of unstructured and structured information hanging out all over the place. Providing smart insights over this information using this engine could drastically improve corporate efficiency, support strategic decision making, etc.

I'd really like to hear what you think. Let's discuss it here (or on Twitter) and try to grasp the implications of Wolfram Alpha for the enterprise (-- without having seen it).

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Tags van Technorati: semantic web,web 3.0,language technology