Business Two Zero

There has been too long a hiatus since the last London Wiki Wednesday (which happened to be a very “Wikipedia” oriented affair). The big gap was caused partly by me getting very distracted with a very busy few months with WordFrame and the day job, and some family stuff. However, the biggest factor was the pain of finding an available venue and sponsors to maintain the format - free, with beer, wine and food available.

LWW - 13 August 2008
To kick things back off, Alek Lotoczko will be providing NYK Shipping’s premises (again! but we love the view), and WordFrame will be the sponsor. The next event will be August 13 - the second Wednesday of next month. We hope to get back to monthly meetings, targeting the first Wednesday of each month thereafter. Please go to the LWW wiki page and book your place as normal. As usual, everyone who comes along will get the chance to speak about their wiki related project or business for up to 5 minutes. Sequence of the agenda is first come first served, so book on as soon as you can.

London Wiki UnWednesday
For anyone who can’t wait a month and a half, we’ll be holding a London Wiki UnWednesday straight after this Friday’s London Social Media Café from 12:00 to 14:00 at The Coach & Horses in Greek Street (see map). Sign up at the wiki page.  We’ll be talking wikis, deciding on a theme or topic for the August meeting, plus trying to solve the problem of sponsorship. Ideally we need a steady flow of volunteer organizations who are prepared to provide a space and put their hands in their pockets for a few hundred pounds to buy the booze and food, in return for a little exposure and link love.

So I hope to see you on Friday, and on Wednesday 13 August.

Via Merredith, the straight talking Mass Media Director of The Hoffman Agency who has just started blogging with a little clarity from Colorado, I was pointed to ReadWriteWeb highlighting research that shows that email personalization can backfire. A University of Illinois study confirms the common sense feeling that “personalized” marketing communication online can often make us actively dislike the message’s sender.

Tiffany Barnett White, the marketing professor who headed the research said:

“When messages are highly personalized, but lack value and justification, they have unintended effects. They can actually have a boomerang effect and cast the firm in a negative light, sending customers running to the competition.”

She went on to say:

“Nowadays, consumers are so much more savvy. They’re so bombarded with tricks of this nature that they start to seem like tricks. So the onus in on marketers to convince consumers that this isn’t a trick, that it has some value.”

So Flickr saying hola Mandy (or whoever you are) is cool, but there is a line that a marketer can cross that makes us uncomfortable with false familiarity. As with all technology, just because you’ve got the ability to tailor email messages with lots of detail you’ve collected about the receiver doesn’t mean you should use it. Pulling in the extra detail will work if it’s directly relevant, but could backfire unless the person you are mailing sees the value. This suggests that the simple approach is probably better, and that will help small businesses who tend to have less sophisticated email marketing tools.

One of the key reasons I got involved with ITBrix and WordFrame, first as a partner, and then joining the company with a stake in the business, was the quality of the development and support team that George has put together over in Plovdiv. I did a trip report on the WordFrame blog for last week’s visit to meet some new partners. I met Vicki Tambelinni of Synergy3 there and she mailed me to say:

“The WordFrame development team is the best team that I’ve ever seen. Not only are they a highly competent group of individuals, they are a well-disciplined team. The team approach that they have created along with the rigor of their process, the visionary leadership and the quality engineering will ultimately assure customers that they are using a product that they can trust. The transparency that has been built in to the support database is unparalleled in the industry. The WordFrame team is delivering what others have simply been talking about!”

Vicki’s got a lot of experience, having been a Regional Manager at Oracle and a General Manager and Vice President at PeopleSoft. I completely agree with her - the guys are doing a great job over there.

I’m just finishing off a few very productive days in Plovdiv, at the WordFrame development centre, where we’ve been negotiating and planning with two new prospective partners. Later today I’ll be heading to Milan, and driving to Varese to speak at the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0. The conference is being organized by my friend Emanuele Quintarrelli, one of Europe’s best known bloggers on the enterprise 2.0 topic, and his company OpenKnowledge, in conjunction with the Università dell’Insubria.

On their website, they describe the conference like this:

• A 360° overview on Enterprise 2.0 business and organizative impact
• A comprehensive exploration of Enterprise 2.0 tools and techniques: tagging, blogging, wiki, feed rss, open innovation, widgets
• A concrete and pragmatic approach with a strong focus on real case studies and well-proven methodologies
• Thought leaders and widely renowned speakers from all over the world

The speakers include Luis Saurez of IBM - I was with him only two weeks ago at Boston’s Enterprise 2.0 conference, and I’m looking forward to hear what he has to say in his talk “See the Light - Thinking out of the Inbox! ” He recently reminded me of the Doc Searls quote:

“Email is where knowledge goes to die”

The other speakers are Thomas van der Wal, Stewart Mader (we use his Wikipatterns book and resource all of the time) , Laurence Lock Lee and Ran Shribman. I’ll be doing a presentation version of the workshop I ran at last week’s NLab Social Networking Conference at De Montfort University. It uses our recent implementation of WordFrame at the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales as a case study of how to build better web communities that add value to an organization. I’ll be going through approaches to building a community, content and community management, highlighting success factors and making practical recommendations to ensure a positive outcome. The ICAEW’s IT Counts community just won Best New Web 2.0 Initiative, so it is a great story, with some good conclusions. While I was putting together the material I was trying to investigate other cases studies that highlighted metrics to track whether we were doing well or badly. I found that there are very few good stories, and very limited statistics. After the event I’ll be publishing the PowerPoints on SlideShare, and doing a write up here which details what we now track to measure the success of this type of enterprise 2.0 community solution. I’m looking forward to a brief visit to one of my favourite parts of Italy, near the lakes, but more importantly to what I know will be a great conference.

Yesterday, at Web 2.0 Strategies 2008 in London, the ICAEW’s IT Counts community won the award for “The Best New Web 2.0 Initiative”. IT Counts, which is sponsored by Microsoft, provides practical IT advice for accountants in business and in practice. It is part of the ICAEW online network (ion), a new collection of web communities, powered by WordFrame, and available free of charge to ICAEW members. The institute, which is the UK’s largest professional membership organization for accountants, is providing blogs, wikis, people profiles, professional connections, the use of RSS feeds, group messaging and document management to their member network so that they can complement the physical meetings of regional and special interest groups with an online presence.

Web2.0 Strategies is the UK’s leading forum for exploring real-world implementations of web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 tools and techniques. The conference was chaired by social media expert Euan Semple, and had speakers like Dion Hinchcliffe, President & CTO, Hinchcliffe & Company, Julie Meyer, Founder & CEO, Ariadne Capital and Jeff Schick, Vice President of social software, IBM Lotus.

Carolyn Harrington, ICAEW’s Head of Commercial Initiatives Development, Member Services, and Stuart Hall, their Online Communities Manager were there to collect the award on the Institute’s behalf from Kat Allen, Director of the Information Division of Incisive Media (formerly VNU). Kat was responsible for the event and is publisher of Information World Review, which was the co-host.

We are delighted that the community has got this level of recognition, and we expect there to be further press releases and press coverage available soon.

Photo courtesy of Stuart Hall

I had a great session yesterday with Sigurd Rinde on the latest version of Thingamy. We’ve been part of Sig’s ecosystem of consultants and partners working with his innovative business modelling solution for some time. Sig was showing off the product’s new interface and talking through the latest prototype he had been demoing at a media company while he has been in the UK. That demo crosses over with some of our own thoughts on creativity, because it was all to do with creating a repository for ideas to be captured, developed and actioned through to the point that they add value to the organization. It’s the kind of thing every organization does to a lesser or greater extent.

Sig’s philosophy on business is too radical for some who are entrenched in the transaction oriented systems we are all used to. Sig would argue that the reason that businesses are rooted to complexity goes back to 1494 and Luca Pacioli’s double entry bookkeeping. From that point on we’ve been obsessed with creating entries in the ledger book, pieces of paper for filing, or records within transactional software that add unnecessary objects and steps in to the business process. As you add each of these the complexity starts to increase exponentially, and the procedures become way too rigid for the way real business happens in the workplace. Sig’s thinking gets to the heart of what a business actually is - a social group with a purpose, and then cuts through the clutter to focus on the real value chain involved rather than the accepted way of doing things.

Sig talks about ERP as Easily Repeatable Processes and begrudgingly sees how conventional systems might work for some parts of the sales, distribution and manufacturing processes in certain enterprises. It’s very difficult for most organisations to “get it” and want to go back to basics to re-invent their systems from scratch. With the complete market for business systems and application sectors to aim at with Thingamy, he is quite rightly focussing on the kind of knowledge work that there is a lot of attention on at the moment. As has been widely reported and discussed, Forrester has released a report indicating that Enterprise 2.0 spending will reach $4.6 billion by 2013 - a healthy market! Andrew P. McAfee of Harvard Business School says:

“Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers. “

In this environment, Sig argues that Thingamy comes in to its own, because of the ease with which it tackles Barely Repeatable Processes or BRP. This kind of knowledge work is all about ad hoc processes that change and are adapted over time. It’s the sort of thing that, in the web 1.0 world, would be supported by emails trapped in your inbox, or semi manual systems based around Excel spreadsheets with macros. Most organizations still use this kind of approach for the gaps between their main ERP style systems. Sig says it barely scratches the surface of what is required, and it’s exactly why the use of social media tools like blogs and wikis are on the rise. However, he argues that this approach is still wrong:

“These are single task tools that are just used as a sandbox. You can throw out an idea, but without a process or accountability, most of the time nobody bothers. “

We can see that in the way that the success of adoption of these kinds of social media solutions is still variable, and heavily dependent on the expertise of the implementation team. Many organisations don’t understand the culture changes required to make this blog and wiki type of approach work well.

The best way of highlighting the difference in Sig’s approach, is to talk through the demo he created. This was built for a media company to place ideas in a repository, allowing all of the team’s dialogue around each one to be captured. This is the kind of thing you could easily do in a blog or a wiki, but Thingamy allows much more to be done. You can record the progress of the idea through different phases or statuses. You can add whatever process steps you need to route the idea to the right people, or alert others to add input. You can connect the idea to other concepts you might add, like the company strategy, and all of this can be adapted and changed as necessary as the requirements evolve - easily handling BRP. You get the proper accountability that Sig is looking for. His demo took no more than an hour to create from a blank canvass to a working prototype, but it’s more than a prototype - it’s a working solution that could be put in to operation by that company straight away.

All of us enterprise 2.0 providers need to take a leaf out of Sig’s book. We’re producing tools that support the capture and distribution of knowledge, as well as the dialogue that adds value, along with other content that we can bring in from external sources via RSS and other means. We are providing tools for team collaboration and real time communication. We need to start to putting the (barely repeatable) business process at the heart of our solutions.

I’m on LinkedIn, but I’ve never got round to putting much effort in to creating my profile. A few old colleagues have connected with me recently, and I started this week thinking that I needed to smarten the thing up. Yesterday I was browsing the blog of one of our new WordFrame partners - Des Walsh who is based over in Australia. I read the good things he said about the platform and the partnership, but then I spotted his latest post Spring Clean Your LinkedIn Profile, Part One: Basic Makeover. Perfect timing.

Des points out the importance that a LinkedIn profile can have in the current recruitment process, or in making connections for new customers and assignments. Like Des I’ll regularly use LinkedIn, along with ZoomInfo and other tools, to research a new potential client, or the speaker at the next conference. If I use it like that myself, why the hell haven’t I paid more attention to my own? Des carries on:

“For a good overview of what is involved in setting up or refreshing your LinkedIn profile, no one, as far as I know, has yet improved, for immediacy and clarity, on Guy Kawasaki’s January 2007 blog post LinkedIn Profile Extreme Makeover. This shares, with a detailed screenshot, the advice Guy had received from some very knowledgeable LinkedIn staffers, Kay Luo and Mike Lin, on how to make his LinkedIn profile more useful.”

As usual, Guy Kawasaki is properly in tune with the new world of work, and his well crafted extreme makeover is a great place to start. Guy says:

“If you’re going to use LinkedIn, you should put some effort into your profile. My original one reflected a minimal amount of effort. For example, many of my current and past affiliations were missing, and I did not craft good descriptions of what I stand for. This incompleteness made my profile ineffective for networking. Hopefully, my makeover will provide some ideas to help you.”

His current profile shows what can be done. It also reminds me of one of my favourite Mark Twain quotes which is:

“I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.”

Getting the same economy of language that Guy has used to capture what you are all about in few brief sentences is going to take a bit of thought, trial and error before you get it right. To help you, Des’s post has some good advice and some useful links to a step-by-step post at LinkedIn Life, an “insider’s guide to using LinkedIn”, or Scott Allen’s riff on Guy Kawasaki’s extreme makeover post. Have a go and set aside some time to improve yours (and think about doing it regularly). If you look at mine today you’ll see the before - check back later or in a few days and I hope it has improved. Don’t forget to look out for part 2 on Des’s blog too.

A while back, during the interesting time I spent as one of the blognation editors, I did my first ever video interview with the help of Vincent Camara of Intruders.tv. The victim was JP Rangaswami, the MD of BT Design (effectively BT’s CIO ). He was on great form, so my 10 minute spot stretched out to almost 30 minutes! Off camera we were talking about collaboration and social networking platforms. One of the things he said to me which really made an impact was:

“You know David, if you were talking to me about this stuff five years ago, I would have said that’s’ all well and good but can I have it inside my firewall. These days, if we are really serious about being a customer centric organisation, where does this firewall concept come in?”

Last week I noticed James McGovern highlighting the Jim Reavis open letter to the best and the brightest network security architects. He wants is to get some of the best minds together to collaborate and talk about key issues that the next generation firewall must address.

James said:

“Network folks need to realize that there time has come and gone when it comes to securing the modern enterprise. The enterprise is porous as we put more and more web applications on the Internet by exposing them over Port 80 (or 443). Reality says that there is only so much a firewall can possibly do to protect an application and that a better strategy may be to instead figure out how to make the applications protect themselves.”

He’s right - enterprise CIO’s need think differently in the world of enterprise 2.0, and application developers need to keep better watch on design and data security.

Zoho, who have a family of Software as a Service, or web based office applications, have just added a very smart looking HR system to sit alongside their CRM application. The office tools and the CRM application provide a low cost, function rich, but incomplete small business suite. Zoho People adds an HR or Human Capital Management application that looks, on my first quick play with the application yesterday, as function rich as a number of applications I’ve worked with in the past, but at a fraction of the cost.

It contains:

• A drag and drop interface to customize the database or for creating new forms
• Checklists - which provide configurable business processes - these are simple workflows
• An employee portal - with all your employees basic demographic data available to all your HR & benefits staff - this provides self service facilities for the staff, alongside the administrative capabilities for the HR department
• Recruitment & resume management
• An organization chart
• No download, no install, no coding & no implementation

The application is currently in Beta, and for the Beta period it will be free for up to 10 employees. The pricing is yet to be announced, but it’s rumoured to be low cost for the self service portal and of the order of $50 a month for administrative capabilities. I can see this being really useful for small companies who would probably never bother to afford a standard HR package and struggle with data on spreadsheets, but also have enough capability for many medium sized businesses. It’s well worth checking out.

I’ll be suggesting that my friends at MyPaye.co.uk take a serious look at this application, and investigate integration and maybe partnership opportunities. I’d like to play around properly with Checklists, but they could have useful applications outside of HR processes. It’s also an obvious next step for the Zoho suite to add an accounting application, or for the folks at Twinfield or Xero or elsewhere to see if they could fill that gap. Looking at the other commentary from around the Enterprise Irregulars, this move in to HR may make them even more of an acquisition target.

Zoli asks will it disrupt or fail in two parts?
Mashable think some larger companies might switch
Webware worries about Zoho releasing so many apps so fast
Larry Dignan suggests it’s a move toward the “M” in SMB
Dennis Howlett wonders where next?
Raju Vegesna on their own Zoho blog

Probably the main reason I’ve been inactive on this blog for a while has been because of my involvement in ITBRix, the launch of WordFrame, as well as a major WordFrame project. Let me explain a little. First, WordFrame is an enterprise 2.0 platform that helps you build web communities and manage content, that has evolved from Blogtronix. We have been a longstanding partner of Blogtronix, but the following change was announced on February 21st:

“ITBrix LLC, formed in September 2005 and headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colorado, has been one of the co-founders and joint owner of Blogtronix LLC, but now the two companies have decided on a friendly separation.”

As you might expect, the actual situation behind the scenes is a little more complex than can be explained in a few words in a press release. The split actually happened on 1st December 2007, and ITBrix have re-branded their version of the source code WordFrame. As well as D²C becoming a WordFrame partner for the UK and Northern Europe, which will be announced in a formal press release tomorrow, I’ve joined the ITBrix team as well. I’m really pleased to be working with the organization which includes George Athannassov, one of the co-founders of Blogtronix and ITBrix, as well as Boz Zashev the original architect of the product, Rumen Yankov, the chief programmer of the platform, and the Bulgarian based development and support team who have been working on it since 2005. From December last year we’ve been enhancing the product with some significant new functionality, and making sure our pricing works for small and medium businesses as well as larger corporations. You can find out more in the press release and at the new WordFrame website.

The major project I mentioned has been helping the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales (ICAEW) build web communities for their membership based on the WordFrame platform. We’ve been under non disclosure for quite some time, but the news finally broke last week in an AccountingWEB article when they publicised the launch of IT Counts, their community providing practical technology advice to accountants in practice and in business, which is sponsored by Microsoft. There is a growing volume of content, including Dennis Howlett and Simon Hurst who have been hired to blog there regularly, and contributors from Microsoft, the ICAEW and the membership themselves. It’s a very significant move for the Institute, and it’s great to see this kind of professional membership organization embracing web 2.0 technology in this way. I hope to explain more about what we are doing with them over the coming weeks, and we’ve already got plans to work on some case studies for publication.

Lastly, as I write this I’m in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, talking to the WordFrame development team with our latest customer - GroupCom / Neighbo.com. I’ll explain more about the community we are helping them build soon.

Related stories:

Dennis Howlett’s take on IT Counts

Philip Woodgate’s explanation of IT Counts