Sunday I was trying to make sense of a remark Marcel de Ruiter made when we met last November. He said that having a social network was a great way to filter out important information. On sunday I did not get my thoughts right but today I saw a post on User Filtered Content from Ross Dawson and everything made sense!

Besides all the automatic or semi automatic filtering options Andrew Mcafee describes in SLATES a completely human filtering option is a great asset to the bundle. When to take into account who is liking what, you get a far better view of information. Example: I follow a few people on Twitter because I think they are interesting for me and I find links to conferences I did not hear about from another source. Delicious is another fine example. I follow my collegue Vincent amongst others. I can see his links and evaluate if they are relevant for me to. Almost all his links are relevant for me and thus he is one of my filters on information.

This way of filtering gets far better results than a search on google, a search on google is not filtered for what my friends or coworkers like! Extensions like Amazon delivers to me are from everybody in the world. Amazon supposes that if I read a book and most people also buy another book I might be interested. This would be more accurate if this is corrected for the people with the same interests. These people will be in social networks!

The reason this works lies in the meritocracy principles of the internet. On the internet we give more credits to people how say and do smart stuff than to people how only talk about saying and doing smart stuff. The people who get more merits from a person will be a great filter. The giving of merits is very personal. Vincent my coworker can get more merits than a professor in college.

Conclusion is the UFC is a great filter to have on information. The more people you ‘use’ as a filter the better. UFC must always be used in combination with other filters so the information that gets through the filters is of higher quality. To prevent a kind of groupthink you should sometimes get rid of all the filters and just surf around a bit! This gets you fresh ideas and another look at the world.

There are so many topics around about enterprise 2.0. I am trying to make some kind of aggregation of all the information. When you look from an organizational unit perspective I see three levels:

- personal
- team
- organization

The personal level is about how does one knowledge worker work. What tools and principles does he apply in modern day work. The meet charlie presentation is a great example! I think Lifehacking and GTD are great ways to improve productivity (the formost objective in enterprise 2.0). I know GTD is not about web apps but it is a great way to work more efficient. Office 2.0 is an example what enterprise 2.0 at the personal level is all about, a list of tools is at the office 2.0 database. Be warned because these tools are a mix of all levels.

The team level is about collaborating with others. Social networking, wiki’s, online office, projectspaces are key topics in this area. Some are closely related to the personal level. Teamwork is significantly different because it is about working together and the personal level is solely about the work of one person. So google docs is primarily about teamwork, because sharing documents online with others is the best feature in google docs. Why edit a document in google docs without sharing it with others?

The last level is corporate level. The corporate challenge is to get principles in play like perpetual beta, emergent structures, openness. Thus giving a platform to workers and facilitating knowledge processes. Company level is more about the big principles and enterprise class tools.

In a company that wants to adress enterprise 2.0 you have to take on each level, because the combination will produce more productivity! If you have only organizational level enterprise 2.0 solutions in place but no solutions at the individual worker level you will miss out. They will have great ways to filter in the enterprise class content but still drown in email!

The levels are off course no chinese walls but an insight to thinking about your solutions in your company!

How do you look at enterprise 2.0, do you look at this form the same perspective or another?

Enterprise 2.0 is (amongst other things) about iconic labels such as emergent, tagging, folksonomies, social bookmarking and, you could say, a new paradigm everything is miscellaneous. The third order of order. This pattern is evolving and blogs, books and webinars are picking up the pace. Does this mean that enterprises should loosen up and “Give up control“?

BPM focuses on identifying, designing, implementing and managing business processes within an organization. The realm of ECM focuses on achieving a centralized, structured, transparent and compliant (and more) digital working environment. Combined, you could say the ambition of BPM and ECM is an organization being in control of what they do, how they do it and improving on that continuously. “Being in control“!

At first glance E2.0 and BPM/ECM sound quite like a paradox. But are they? In my opinion, they aren’t. James Surowiecki gives a beautiful hint of this in its bestseller the Wisdom Of Crowds. You need both structured centralization (or as he says “aggregation”) and unstructured (or niche-structured) decentralization. Explicitly: you can give op control in the niches of work, but you have to remain in control at the centre of it; as a whole.

As a matter of fact, the basis of giving up control is first of all having enough of it. The structured repositories of information, materialized through the implemented business processes, gives an organization a jumping platform to dive into the unstructured world. It’s the next step in digital working. After getting grip on these structured processes, what’s left are the unstructured ones. The characteristics of these processes are collaborative, knowledge intensive and highly unpredictable. Just suitable for E2.0 concepts.

What I find fascinating is trying to identify the design principles, or main beliefs, of the new Enterprise 2.0 concepts and identify the consequences of the digital working environment of today, 1.0. Bridging the gap between then and now.

An example thereof is implementing a social bookmarking principle for search an retrieval on top of the established taxonomies and metadata schemas for archival, process management and compliancy purposes. The result: best of both worlds. The organization is in charge of it’s processes and the team of three individuals somewhere within the company can find their specialized information the way they want to; the workforce cumulatively establishing a layer of social tags on top of the existing and rigid taxonomies.

Summarizing: not all is miscellaneous, but then everything could be.

This week Robbert, Melior and I created an article on “Internet consultation“, in little more than a day. It was co-produced entirely with the aid of Google Docs and Skype. The article turned out quite nicely, but, the process of creating it was very captivating in itself as well. I dare to say that this article couldn’t have been co-produced at this speed and quality without using the above mentioned “E2.0 tool set”.

What was so captivating en what value was added by the tool set, I hear you say?

To get the context clear
First of all, Robbert was working in Groningen, Melior in Amersfoort and I at my project in The Hague. So, getting together wasn’t an option.
Secondly, we were very busy and had overlapping meetings at our projects. So, claiming a time-frame to do a conference call was neither an option
Third, we all read the press-release independently, all had ideas, but how to put those ideas on the same page (meaning this literally and figurative) quickly and coherently?
Last but not least, the article had to be ready within a short time frame. A press-release doesn’t stay there for the taking very long.

Google docs
We needed an environment wherein we could “dump” our initial statements (very mind-mapping) on the canvas, during the scarce moments between meetings, but in sight for the others to see. We needed real-time collaboration, with which the story could unfold organically, separately, but together. Sounds paradoxical? Not so. With GoolgeDocs such a canvas is created with ease. Each statement, word, sentence written by an editor, gets pushed in real-time to the other editors (even when he’s not there, the canvas just gets refreshed). So there’s no asynchronous “checking out” of documents, “locked” documents or “read-only” documents that have to be stitched together afterwards. The synergy is there for the taking! And it was. Adding statements, enriching each others, editing, using the growing canvas as input for your mindmap. Very energetic.
Furthermore, real-time collaboration also deals with another bottleneck in asynchronous writing. I call this the “Ping-Pong effect”: getting the different pieces of text of the editors aligned and making it one coherent story. With real-time collaboration, each sharing the same canvas, this aligning was self originating: quickly using the same definitions, labels, picking up on a metaphor, referring to a piece of material just produced 5 seconds ago by your co-producer, keeping the thread of the story while it unfolds.. It comes naturally and stays that way.

Skype
What we also needed was a medium which we could use to establish a “working method” for co-producing the article: I’ll take paragraph one, you’ll take two. Stay out of that part, Could you look at that sentence, What’s your opinion on the last paragraph, Could you pick op on my metaphor, et cetera. The phone wasn’t the way to go here, since our time-frames weren’t overlapping. Skype was perfect: I could suggest a working method to the co-production group (being the three of us) at once (and visa verse), it would stay blinking until read. So, the main rules of editing established itself just as organically as the article!

In result
It was quite exhilarating putting the puzzle together in this way. The result, and I say this totally unambiguous, a very interesting article! So, the next time you want to create co-produce an article, think of using the “E2.0-tool set” of doing it.

The basic idea of twittering is sharing social information with your friends. An example is hyves where you can let know what is on your mind by 140 characters (this is called ‘wat doe je’). All your friends can read and react to your short social/emotional message. This is more or less the same on twitter. But will this also work in our organisations? Will a worker ever put his social message in a Tweet and share it with the whole company? Does the rest of the company care about the Tweet of the salesmanager?

Maybe you have some doubts, but realise that the mental model in the organisation is that employees every day have their CCC ‘coffee-corner-chat’. And as we all know if you are seeking for the right information or you are preparing a decision in a meeting, the first thing to do is triple C. And because employees are known with sharing things with each other in their mental model. We expect that supporting this habit by Twitter, people will use twitter from day one. Maybe you should rename it to coffee-chat, so everybody know what twitter is.

For example:

I went on a biking trip this weekend and hit a tree. Monday morning in my coffee-chat I put the words ‘I’am hurt by a three’. Later that day Robbert sees me in the restaurant and asked me how I’am doing.

One of the best things about twitter is the possibility to twitter by more features then internet but also SMS of txt!

This very simple example shows how the social structure in your company can grow.
And yes we hear you thinking: will my people still work and are they going to socialize allday long. Maybe the first two days people are using it like mad. But they will start to be smart about it and only twitter useful stuff. Then your social structure will get stronger. And the positive impact on performance will happen.

So our advise, don’t wait, start today with introducing the digital coffee-chat. This is a great way to enhance the social structure of you company at no cost!

A nice video is here from MIT about twitter and ambient intimacy

this post is written by hendri and robbert

Last friday the Dutch government raised the green flag on “internet consultation”. In short, “internet consultation” means people are able to get involved in making new regulations and legislation. From the beginning of 2008 a pilot will be launched, which will last for a period of two years. In our opinion, there’s something special about this inititiave.

What makes this a (very) good initiative
In 2007, the dutch government spent 100 days talking with the public and discussing forthcoming regulations (amongst other subjects). It’s goal: getting back in touch with its citizens, listening to what they have to say, and therebye “closing the gap”. Taking the dialogue online is a logic next step. Actually, to put things in perspective, we think this is a great start and a big step towards embrasing the viable concepts of “Enterprise 2.0″ and to put them to good use. Explicitly: “internet consultation on legislation” means a shift from “Invented behind closed doors” to “A transparant co-production between Government and it’s Citizens”. The potential outcome: higher quality of legislation, within a shorter timeframe, which is more accepted and embedded within the country.
Of course, the legislationproces already has it’s formal plannend public moments wherin citizens can make a stand. But these moments are scarce, few and scatered in time. This initiative takes making regulations to another level. It makes the designproces transparant, the citizens are consulted, get involved, are asked for there opinion en can actively give there input. It’s a brave step in letting go of the orchestrated designproces into the unknown. This initiative fits perfectly in the strategy of becomming a more effective, flexible and decisive (e)Government.

What will make or brake it, from our opinion
A brave step, but not an easy one. From our opinion, several aspects could make our brake the initiative.

It’s about a higher quality of legislation in a shorter timeframe. Not about doing “Enterprise 2.0″, or being “eGov”
We’ve stated that internet consultation is a form of embrasing Enterprise 2.0. That’s a nice statement, but it’s just a label. The real goal and the consequented paradigmshift, should not be forgotten: a higher quality of legislation! produced bij citizens and the governement side by side! In a shorter timeframe! With a higher degree of acceptance!
The initiative shouldn’t be something that’s fits nicely on the currenct political agenda, but can fall off when the agenda shifts: politicians come and go. It shouldn’t be going for the hype either. Hypes will pass, and so will their labels. But each hype has it’s tendensies, it’s possibilities and it consequences. The potential of this initiative is huge, but stay focussed on the goal, not the hype, nor the political agenda.

Carefully identify and select the subjects that are prone to “co-production”, don’t just “put them all out there for everybody”
Not every piece of legislation fits in the co-production pie. Nor does every citizen have the potential to become a co-producer on all (forthcoming) legislation. Think carefully about which legislation should be adressed in this new innovative form. For instance, pick the ones that are interesting for the masses, on which te public opinion doesn’t vary too much, that aren’t too heavy politically, that aren’t too complex and won’t take for ever to reach completion. Furthermore, think about you co-producergroup. Who can adress the matter and how do they get selected?

Actually listen to your co-producers. And when you listen, you have to give a real response
The much heard critisism in sight of the “100-day walk ‘n’ talk with the citizens”, was that, while the walking and talking part worked out nicely, the “doing something with it and giving feedback on it”-part didn’t get top scores. This is a big pitfall that should be adressed. The government has to be prepared and has to have employees on board which can make the paradigmshift and act accordingly. The citizens are co-producers: “Protizens”. Treat them that way. We had the innovationplatform, it wasn’t a success.
Big companies, like Procter & Gamble, Boeing and Dell made this paradigmshift a while ago and have given some important lessons. They listenend a great deal, but what to do with the opinions, discussions, reactions and new proposals? Dell started gathering ideas online from their customers. The biggest mistake was doing nothing with the top priority ideas. The public could give priority to ideas and clearly made other choices than Dell. Even more reactions started to come in, customers started to complain big time. Eventually Dell started to adopt these ideas and learned the power they unleashed. The Dutch government has to make sure they use the ideas and opinions. Not only it’s employees, but also the internal processes and procedures have to be ready to cope with the output of the public and these processes have to be flexible to scale when it gets succesfull. This is partly the same lessons that should have been learned after the 100-day walk ‘n’ talk critizism. A real eGovernment walks the talk!

Anonymity is a great thing, but creating a secure environment for progressive discussion another
A big concern for most companies is security in starting with Web 2.0 initiatives. Spam and misconduct are the worst nightmare of every online initiative. Spam protection is big business nowadays and very nice initiatives are around to keep spam out! Misconduct can only be managed if people are not anonymous. Getting people to logon and use their real names will make a secure environment to give your opinion. In most companies this is fairly easy, but the bigger you are the harder it gets. Now think about getting a userdatabase for a whole country. We have this in The Netherlands and it is called DigiD. This will be a good test to see wether this service is truely open and reusable!

The tool has to fit the pupose! Not just an IT implementation
Making regulation is about giving opinion and not erasing opinions of others, so no wiki for this project! Giving opinion is more about blogging. But blogposts is more one to many. Discussions between readers is not very well supported by blogs. For the government it has to be important to get some data on whether people aggree or not. This is not supported by blogs but is more like digg.com. Rating regulations, giving comments, discussing sounds nice for a start and not very hard to set up!

This is just one approach to selecting a tool, but it all depends on whats the purpose and being creative.

Don’t just start but think in phases
The chances are you will not be able to get all possible legislation or regulation on the net, target the right people to join in, handle the sitetraffic and (maybe most important) use all the discussions in new legislation! Start simple with one question and a simple site. Form the start choose an emergent strategy on the content side. Use statistics to make choices about the road to follow not just do stuff. On the functionality side start simple and add features. Again use statistics and feedback (i.e. use internet consultation on the topic of the site!) to add features. When the internal operations seems fit to take on more topics, add more topics! Start one department at a time. And for every departement take it slow. Maybe there will be differences on usage and relevance for every departement. The people that join in may be different as well but neither will be representative for The Netherlands in total.
16 milion people will be able to use the site and will have high expectations. 11.000 people will have to work with the consultations. If you do not start small you will have a lot of mad people!
Don’t be scared if the number of active contributors is small. Wikipedia only has a small number of contributors and manages to make the most valuable encyclopedia around. Somewhere between 1 in 30 or 1 in 100 people will contribute. And not all 16 milion people will join in. Lets say 3 milion people will come to the site. Then 30.000 people will contribute! You only have to stay relaxed and spread the word in the right places.

(This Blogentry was co-produced bij Robbert, Vincent and Melior using Googledocs realtime and Skype)

Yesterday I was at the first Enterprise 2.0 conference in Holland. One day people from a wide range of enterprises got together and talked about web 2.0 inside the enterprise. Vincent Everts talked us through the day and lively introduced the speakers.

The first speaker was René Jansen who talked about his research with the University of Amsterdam and his company Winkwaves. Web 2.0 according to René is all about connecting people on a common theme. This insight is very meaningful, we should take those theme’s as a starting point for collaboration. While most companies will start with their hierarchy. The important measurement for success being the true interest of people. You should find out whether the passion of my coworkers is in the hierarchy or common theme’s.

IB’M showed us Connections, a Lotus Notes based application that allows the employees to have profile pages, community pages, blogs and dogear. It looked quite nice and this product is for sale right now! The people of IBM are using this product now on the intranet and the usage stats looked very impressive.

An interesting case was made by Frank Smilda on police investigations using web 2.0 tactics. They are giving away information on cold an hot cases, letting civilian investigators join in cracking the case. The results looked very good. They were talking about adding a lot of standard web 2.0 tools to the service. This was actually driven by bloggers who were already using general public to solve crimes.

Off course Micorsoft told us a lot about Sharepoint and their vision about software. It will be on your machine and as a service (SaaS). The question will be if this is true. Today we are more offline than online but this will change and there will come a time that we will always be online! Then SaaS will be the only option, I think.

Wim Scheper talked to us about the repeating facts of history and why enterprise 2.0 is here to stay. When standardization and interchangeability get into play the competition between firms gets going. Enterprise 2.0 is about these two things so they will stay!

The keynote was by Rod Beckstrom, the author of the starfish and the spider. He talked about the decentralization taking place in companies right now to get more flexible and competitive. Enterprise 2.0 is actually a decentralisation thing in IT, no hierarchies should apply in Enterprise 2.0. The power of wiki’s in this movement will be very big. The structured wiki being the top species in wiki-nation (according to wikimatrix) and thus prevailing over other species. Decentralization actually encourages the forming of small world networks in organizations.

So a great day came to end. The thought that stuck the most was the power of communities and the (small world) networks way of organizing your company. I am looking forward to the next enterprise 2.0 conference in Holland!

Should you use Twitter in your company to share ideas? Twitter is about what are you doing today, but what if you are brainstroming and getting ideas? The beginning of a new idea should be short and shared amoung people inside and outside the company. So far Twitter seems to be a good idea. People will react to your ideas or get their own new ideas. This is possible with twitter, you can send messages to people and they can post their own ideas. Ideas occur in all sorts of places, now only form behind a computer. Twitter can do this, allowing you to send text messages! But, what if I want to read all about one idea, or want to rate an idea of follow up on an idea. This cannot be done with twitter.

The thing is for the start of an idea twitter is fantastic, for the second phase of an idea twitter is to simple. But here is the great part, Twitter is open as all apps should be. Why not combine the simple but great Twitter funcionality and the functions of a site like IdeaFactory or IdeaExchange. Both being based of sites like digg. And start the discussion and rating of an idea over there. All the content about the idea is together and still online.

Start an idea on twitter, pass it on to another site when the idea seems good, react to it, rate it and make it! If you make this business idea happen think of me . This is a great way to start an idea, collaborate on the idea online and share it with people around the globe.

this blogpost was made in collaboration with hendri van ‘t ende

A recent trend on the internet is Twitter. Twitter enables you to stay up to date with your friends/colleagues with short messages the ‘tweets’. To read more about twitter go to wikipedia (in english or dutch). On twitter you can search for people you know or navigate through profiles and followers. Links are shared in mini format so they don’t take up much characters. More and more attention is given to this service. You can follow Barack Obama on twitter or Frankwatching. But also some politicians in the Netherlands have twitter profiles. Beside the politicians, the marketing people and de techies we see the first companies and magazines are on twitter using it as an RSS feed or to give twitterers discounts.

In our upcoming items we will give some ideas and inspiration if the twitter trend can have value in an enterprise.

This post is a co-production with hendri van ‘t ende

I have made a bookreview about the latest book by David Weinberger.