InfoWorld's Ephraim Schwartz on the market impact of Lotus Quickr and Connections announcements, including quotes from Gartner's Dave Cearley:
All of this could potentially have an impact on network traffic, bandwidth, and storage, but that is not the largest issue IT faces, according to David Cearley, lead analyst at Gartner.This ties in well to a discussion raised at a customer call earlier this week. A customer asked me, how is all this different than the last time we tried all this, with "knowledge management"?
The main challenge for IT will be delivering a set of end-user computing capabilities that best enable Web 2.0 for the enterprise.
Up until now, IT in the main has been focused on delivering e-mail and Microsoft Word to the desktop. But new tools will now be needed to seed the environment with the ability to build community. Yes, end-users will create, maintain, and drive those communities forward, but according to Cearley, IT will need to deliver a new set of capabilities to make that happen.
For example, there are a lot of tools for blogs and wikis. Differentiating the functionalities each offers will be vital as enterprise demand for these tools proliferates.
"Simply giving someone wiki capability doesn't mean anything," Cearley says. Rather, IT will have to identify how employees will use the functionality, paying particular attention to the types of communities they will want to build. IT will then have to examine a range of social software to determine the best fit.
Choosing a solution is one thing; getting end-users up to speed is quite another. If you recall back in the '80s companies actually had end-user computing departments that worked with people to show them how to use word processors and how to create applications with spreadsheets. Over time, the need for that kind of end-user support diminished.
Giving end-users the ability to create applications and mashups will likely mean a resurgence in the importance of having an adequate end-user support plan in place.
My answer was on two levels: Technical and cultural.
On the technical side, I think the biggest difference is that the technology is self-service. In "Knowledge Management", systems or administrators built taxonomies. In web 2.0, users build tag clouds. In KM, users had predefined views. In web 2.0, I have favorites and profiles. Today, if I want to blog, I start a blog -- full stop.
On the cultural side, I think that the web 2.0 consumer tools have taught early adopters what the value is of information sharing. Look at LinkedIn. A person's network, access to "power", and connections used to be something that was guarded closely, cultivated carefully, and accessed sparingly. Now, it's out there for everyone to see. I don't have to be in the "inner circle" to find my way to useful people. Blogging, myspace/facebook, even the voting/recommendations buttons that mainstream news sites have added, all contribute to a user empowerment that absolutely didn't exist in the knowledge management era.
Look in our own community. Those who are "Lotus bloggers" have demonstrated their expertise on the product and solutions. That has lead to many of them/you being asked to speak at conferences, consulting engagements, and even friendships. In the past, that knowledge was guarded and used to differentiate. Now it is shared and used to differentiate. The culture of sharing has always been there around Notes (i.e. LNOTES-L, Notes.net, etc.), but now it's exploded.
I think we're aligned for success in bringing social networking and web 2.0 technologies into the mainstream, fast, friendly, and useful. We're on the rocket ship ride now, with more to come in the next few months.
Link: InfoWorld: IBM lends gravitas to Enterprise 2.0 trend > (Thanks, Ed)
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Keith Brooks http://kbmsg.blogspot.com | 6/20/2007 9:12:04 AM
Most definitely there is a lack of education about software these days. Just because you can turn on a computer and click on an icon does not mean you are using the 99.5% of the functions of the software.
People's lives would be very different if they really knew how to use a spreadsheet or database or Notes clients for that matter.
But it is the last thing anyone wants to do because it costs money? It costs more money to pay people to take 2 hours instead of 1 to produce a document. But corps don't care since they are hiring cheaper priced people with little interest in growth.
Just showing someone they can change the view in a Notes client saved them time because they could not see the attachment icons!
Besides the IT help desk would get fewer "dumb" calls.
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Simon Scullion http://simonscullion.com/ | 6/20/2007 10:02:15 AM
Ed, I agree on the technical side, the tools are incredibly easy to use, a great job has been done on making them so intuitive. However, IT depts will need to make sure they put them on the appropriate hardware and have plenty of bandwidth available in order to avoid killing adoption at roll-out.
On the cultural point though, while I agree some early adopters may understand the value, there are plenty that don't, or more specifically, are finding it difficult to quantify in real terms. This is going to be one of the biggest barriers to adoption in my opinion.
That together with the internal culture of companies having to change to truly recognise the importance of sharing knowledge, by rewarding their employees who do so effectively.
I still think there are far too many who will come out with the "if we're blogging we're not working" kind of attitude, not to mention other cultural barriers and "control" issues.
I hope I am wrong, meanwhile anything we can do to strengthen the ROI message can only help.
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Randall Shimizu | 6/21/2007 1:56:05 AM
IBM Info 2.0...??
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Stuart McIntyre http://lotusconnectionsblog.com | 6/21/2007 2:31:25 AM
@4 from QuickrBlog.com
"Now we've all known about Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections since Lotusphere this January, but IBM Info 2.0 is a new one. It also isn't currently mentioned on the Web Goes to Work site. The InfoWorld article frames it as follows:
Info 2.0 is a mashup technology that gives users the ability to mix and match components from various applications to make new applications. The example IBM offers is a store manager tracking inventory shipments against weather reports from national weather advisories and then mapping that with Google for inventory management.
I asked about this on the Blogger Q&A I attended yesterday, and it sounds as if this is going to be a toolkit that makes it much easier to aggregate content from existing backend systems so that it can then be integrated into a Web2.0 application or framework. Product plans are suggested (subject to change as ever) to involve a beta program in Q3 with product release in late Q4. Sounds good."
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Stuart McIntyre http://quickrblog.com | 6/21/2007 11:39:07 PM
@4 Lauren Cooney works in IBM's Info Management CTO office, and her blog { Link } has a number of recent postings on Info2.0. (By the way, what are they going to call the next version of the product - Info2.0 2.0?)
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Randall Shimizu | 6/22/2007 12:48:43 AM
Info 2.0 sound a lot like Lotus connections.. There was some speculation as to what products and features would be included in Quickr and Connections last month at the road show in Costa Mesa. Another possibliltiy is that Info 2.0 is a new product that consists of products that were left out.
Ed:
Can you clarify on Info 2.0 or can you say when the product will be released...??
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Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 6/22/2007 5:59:35 AM
@7 see the link Stuart posted in @6. It's not a product at the moment, and it's not being developed in "Lotus".
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Mike Gotta http://mikeg.typepad.com | 6/22/2007 10:23:08 AM
The idea in the article that "IT will have to identify how employees will use the functionality" I find quite odd. It reminds me of a lock-down, traditional command-and-control approach. To some extent - the notion of emergence means that the simple act of "giving" enables people to do things that are rather free-form - my experience with clients using wikis is that users own the use case, adoption and interaction patterns. IT owns the platform enablement to ensure proper due diligence around security, compliance and such.
Regarding KM, these tools take advantage of a maturing hypertext platform - agree - notions of self-service (perhaps "collective service) enable us to focus on the non-technology aspects, such as culture, more effectively.
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Lauren Cooney http://www.jroller.com/page/cooney | 6/22/2007 4:06:43 PM
Info 2.0 is actually more of a concept behind a suite of products we're going to be putting out (3, for right now), which include QEDWiki (already released on AlphaWorks, Mashup Hub (available next week on AlphaWorks, I believe), and DAMIA (live mid-July). Info 2.0 is the information fabric that organizes enterprise data so it can be used within mashups in a more useful way (ie, faster time to value, but let's keep marketing out of it for now ;) ). The goal of this is to allow folks to take structured and unstructured data (either from WWW sites or internal databases, or a variety of other sources) and mix and mash this information to create applications for the enterprise (or for internal departments w/in IT, etc).
That's the short of it... you can check out my blog for more info or contact me at cooneyl@us.ibm.com
There's more to come, and it's moving quickly, so stay tuned...
Lauren
Absolutely Ed, on the button.
In so many ways, the Lotus message hasn't changed a great deal in 15 years - collaboration, knowledge enhancement and management, empowerment of users, anywhere/anytime access etc. were strengths of Domino/Notes years ago, and are now key factors in the Web2.0 movement.
It is great that IBM has been innovative in this space in the last 6-12 months and got ahead of the game with Connections and Quickr, and now has begun to market them in the right way. I really like the "Web2.0 Goes to Work" message - might this be one of the factors in finally stopping the Lotus marketing sucks arguments? I really hope so.