Lars Trieloff's Collaboration Weblog

In my daily RSS skimming session, two articles managed to stick: Andrew Gent's Web 2.0 and the Lack of Process and Michael Marth's Data First ist gaining traction in the industry. While Andrew criticizes that Web 2.0 technology comes without a process and without structure, opposed to traditional tools in the enterprise such as Content Management Systems (CMS):

By that I mean that the technology itself makes no assumption about how or why the technology would be used. What is the usage model for Twitter? Who should blog? What should you use a wiki for? The answer -- if you bother to ask -- is usually "whatever you want!"

Interestingly Andrew opposes these "process-less technologies", also including blogs not only to CMS, but also to E-Mail, Instant Messaging, IRC and web pages:

Email, for instance. Process is designed into the very core of most of these older technologies. You have an email client. You choose who to send email to. They can read it, reply to it, forward it, save it, and delete it. That's all. The technology embodies the processes previously defined for physical mail.

If this is an example for the process that the tool makes assumptions about, then there is definitely a process for Wikis:

• You read a wiki page
• You edit a wiki page
• Other people read your contribution
• Other people edit the wiki page
• Repeat

There is a process for blogs:

• You write a blog post
• Other people read your blog post
• Other people comment your blog post

Out of this process emerged new technologies that were intended to improve the process. In the blogging space examples are Trackback and CoComment, which improve the process of commenting in a blog. Even twitter has a process, or an etiquette: "Follow your followers, to allow discussions" is one aspect of this etiquette.

And even tools like E-Mail, Instant Messaging and IRC needed some time to develop their own etiquette: How much time am I allowed to let pass before I answer an E-Mail? Should I send instant messages to people with an "away" presence state? It is not the tools that create the process, its the people. People decide how to use Twitter, how to use Blogs, how to use Wikis, how to use E-Mail, how to use Social Networks, how to use Instant Messaging.

People first, process later

If you try to implement technologies the other way round, without either implementing or improving existing processes (which classical enterprise software does), or allowing people to define and develop their own processes (which Enterprise 2.0 does, but the same applies to E-Mail, Instant Messaging, etc), you will fail, because your software is not able to meet the needs of your users.

A similar approach, in a different domain, is described by the keywords data first, structure later. In software development, we are obsessed with structure. Having ontologies, taxonomies, schemas, class hierarchies, typologies, classifications, structured data seems the way to build successful applications. But as in the enterprise, too much structure without relation to the reality (here people, there data) will render your classification useless. Therefore a new class of frameworks is emerging that does not enforce structured data, but allows structurable data. If you want to know what this means in terms of technology, have another look at Data first is gaining traction in the industry.

Andrew McAfee writes about the concetric circles for knowledge workers - there are close colleagues, people you directly work with, people you could potentially work with, other people in your company and people you have no relation to. Social networks are tools that allow you to widen the second circle. They allow you to get to know more people for possible collaboration you do not know already and they allow you to manage loosely coupled relationships to more people than you could without tool support.

A recent piece by Alex Iskold: The Social Enterprise - What Works, and What Doesn't says social tools in the enterprise allow communication paths outside the organization chart graph. The reason is that classical tools for enterprise organization like the org chart focus on positions, not people. To illustrate this, you could use a sketch like this: We can see clearly the boxes and arrows, indicating the organizational structure. As for the people, the organizational contents, we can only see the head clearly, for all other people in the organization that we do not know directly, vision becomes blurry.

With social networking tools it becomes possible to see the actual people behind the positions, you can find out about interests, activities and create an image of a person you have not yet met in real-life, but which could help you in a future challenge.

This allows you to create connections and social structures that span multiple branches of the organizational tree. As an effect, people become more important than their position in the org chart and you can create more decentralized organizational structures like virtual teams.

As a side-note: While writing this post I realized how this people (social content) over organization (social structure) notion reflect David Nüscheler's mantra of "content first, structure later" applied to social systems.

Day 2 of Enterprise 2.0 is nearly over and I have officially run out of business cards. In the morning, right after breakfast we met Marc Orchant and Michael Sampson, right after it we had a marathon of meetings with analysts, journalists and bloggers. One of the most interesting discussions I had was with Irvin Lazar who told me how big enterprises are increasingly opening up to Enterprise 2.0 technology and how independent teams deploy this technology without awaiting aproval from their CIOs.

At the demo booth I had around 100 presentations, talks and met a lot of interesting people. Stephan's presentation went extraordinarily well, and I dont't need to tell you, as Alex already wrote it: Mindquarry GO is out and you can apply from today for a hosted Mindquarry server provided by Mindquarry.

Finally I met Matt and Greg of Jive Software which gave me a demo on Clearspace X, a really cool proprietary software that combines blogging, wiki and file sharing.

Boston is a great city. I am always impressed when I visit a city that has an actual skyline. Living in germany this is something I am not used to see every day. Today I got up much to early thanks to my european inner clock. The conference took an slow start, but I had no time to visit any of the tutorials even if Michael Sampson's Mindmaps on the IT Manager 2.0 look really interesting.

I spent most of my time getting Mindquarry 1.2 ready to be demoable tomorrow, dealing with support questions on the forum, helping Nadia with internationalization of Mindquarry (Yes, I would love to see a Japanese version of Mindquarry) and meeting interesting people with interesting blogs I have to subscribe to.

For more coverage of Enterprise 2.0, see Stephan's post on the Mindquarry Blog.

We just released Mindquarry 1.1 the latest version of our open source collaboration platform. Since 1.1-beta we have fixed lots of bugs, updated documentation and changed the design of some dialogs slightly. Since 1.0 we have added lots of new features including timelines for all content, an AJAX-powered interface, a better WYSIWYG Wiki editor and some more things I already blogged about when Mindquarry 1.1-beta was out. In other news, I will go to Boston this weekend and for the whole next week, because Mindquarry presents at [Enterprise 2.0. I am very excited, not only because I am visiting the united states for the first time, but also because I am going to present some new features in that will be part of Mindquarry 1.2.

If you are visiting Enterprise 2.0, please send me a mail, I would be delighted to meet you, present our new features and talk about collaboration, open source and web technology.