A couple of weeks ago I was in Sapporo at the Infinity Ventures Summit (the site’s in Japanese) to talk about the role of informal networks in business and show off Trampoline’s SONAR Suite. This is the largest technology innovation conference in Japan, bringing together the leading start-ups, corporations, analysts and investors. The focus was mainly on mobile and consumer internet so Trampoline really stood out as an enterprise infrastructure provider. We were also one of just four non-Asian firms invited to present.

I’ve travelled in Japan in the past but this was my first visit in a business context. The amazing etiquette involved in exchanging business cards was the first thing that struck me. In an unstructured setting like a drinks reception in the West cards are typically swapped at the end of a conversation if there’s a likely relevance for future contact. In Japan cards are exchanged at the start of a conversation with no filter for relevance. This means you get through a lot of cards and your pockets rapidly end up bulging with other people’s.

Cards must be offered horizontally with the text in the correct orientation for the recipient, held at the corners in both hands. When you receive a card you must hold it similarly in both hands and give it your full attention for a second or two before looking up or continuing conversation. You must hold the card in front of you throughout the conversation. It’s insulting to put it in your pocket, scribble a note on it or (worst of all) hand someone a crumpled or disfigured card. If you’re sitting around a table with people the correct thing to do is lay everyone’s cards out in front of you in a neat row matching their positions around the table.

What interested me most, however, was the cultural alignment of Japanese enterprises with social computing solutions. Previously I’d assumed that Japanese business culture would be intrinsically hostile to technologies that make informal groupings and networks visible, or which lead to information being shared in new ways, since there is sensitive etiquette surrounding these processes. However my experiences in Sapporo completely changed my view of this.

The connection I’d failed to make previously is that Japanese corporations have historically placed a much higher value on the informal networks amongst their employees than their Western counterparts. Within the “shushin koyo” model of life-long relationships between employer and employee, many aspects of the individual’s social life were organised and supported by the corporation. This was seen to build organisational strength and forge links outside the formal structure (both of which are also notable drivers for social networking tools in the enterprise). During the long recession in the 1990s a lot of these extra-curricular activities were cut, but a management culture persisted in which informal networks were highly valued. On the face of it enterprise social computing tools are perfectly placed to fill this gap.

In many cases products developed for a Western market will need to be modified significantly before they are suitable for Japanese customers. This won’t simply be a case of changing language in the user interface. Behaviours around privacy management and authorisation will almost certainly need to be modified to fit different cultural nuances. But contrary to my initial assumption, Japanese corporations may prove to be early and well-informed adopters of social computing technologies.

I’m indebted to Shuji Honjo for drawing my attention to the possible like between social computing and corporate involvement in extra-curricular activities.

Charles Armstrong, Trampoline’s CEO, will be speaking at WorkTech08 North in a few week’s time. WorkTech, organised by the Cordless Group, is a forum on the future of work and the workplace and is in it’s fifth year. The theme this time is Creative Places, New Media and The Future of Work, so it’s likely to be very interesting to anyone working with new enterprise technologies.

Charles will be speaking with Philip Ross, CEO of Cordless Group, on the topic The Connected Enterprise. They will look at technology trends that empower employees to connect, collaborate and innovate, and examine ways of strengthening informal employee networks across departments and geographies.

WorkTech08 North will be held at The Lowry, Salford Quays, Greater Manchester on 23rd and 24th July. Learn more here.

I had a video made from the visualisations in Trampoline’s products for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference party. The party played with the theme “No man is an island”, for which we had this video showing, blow ups of Charles’ photography from St. Agnes (the tiny island on which he did the ethnographic research into information distribution that led to Trampoline) and little photos as gifts. We had funky furniture and great tunes too, but I can’t find even a tenuous way to link them to the theme. Most importantly, it provided a venue for folks to meet each other, chat and make connections, hopefully resulting in each of them being a less of an “island” in the sea of conference attendees.

Trampoline visualisations video from rebecca kemp on Vimeo.

I wanted our product to look like art, and we did a pretty good job, if i do say so myself. It was made so fabulous by Eddie Codel (editing) and Trampoline Dev (product)! The content is taken from SONAR Dashboard, SONAR Flightdeck and Metascope.

In which a sticker not only ignites the latent inner arts critic of your correspondent. It arouses her rampant, explicit feminist.

One of the four or five women I spoke to on the Web 2.0 Expo floor declined a “No man is an island” sticker with the rebuttal “I’m a woman.” I was dumbstruck, a rare occurrence when discussing Trampoline. Why did this matter so much to me?

First, it was a failure of a piece of work I’d done. That hurts. We created a material with which to engage people, and on this occasion it failed. A small minority of our target audience, admittedly, but it still sucks.

Now the second, overwhelming reason. I often ponder the disconnect between my personal and professional codes of conduct. On occasion the space between them is wider than I’d like, sometimes I am pleased by their convergence. Critics might argue that I should just be myself at all times – especially seen as Trampoline is meant to be an easy-going, do as you please type workplace, or be 100% corporate automaton – but that doesn’t fit here either. I do find the conflation of, or discrepancy between, work and personal behaviours interesting and a helpful lens at work: hardball for women, anyone? In fact, a core principle of Trampoline’s technology is that personal and work behaviours aren’t that dissimilar.

My current method is to push until I’m blue in the face about matters related to work on which I believe comment necessary. So I emit a constant mantra of “hire women, hire women” and try to call people out when they say something I consider offensive or derogatory to women. That’s because I believe having a woman-positive workplace is vital and that women-positive workplaces aren’t formed without effort from all involved.

But I am careful. I would hate anyone telling me to vote Boris (off topic, but it was very dispiriting to return from a Portland, Oregon so full of optimism for Obama, to a London run by the abhorrent Boris Johnson) so I in return I don’t ask anyone to sign petitions against the reduction of the time limit for legal abortion proposed in the amendments to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. I would love it if you did, though. And besides, my begging quota is most effectively used at work for work stuff.

The Web 2.0 Expo stickers didn’t always bear the legend No Man is an Island. We mocked up an early version which read No man (or woman) is an island.

We nuked this version because:

a) it didn’t look clean enough

b) women were still an afterthought

c) it’s not a real quote

d) Donne’s habit of woman as land metaphor has always pained me

e) we’ve got the sisterhood, right?

I like to think that if we had used this version, the woman would have accepted the sticker. But, perhaps ironically, I still wouldn’t change it.

The use of he/she, man/woman is one crux of my personal and professional conduct conflict. I use “she”, rather than “he”, always in my personal life. In work, I try to use “she” first, then “he”. I don’t like “he” as a catch all but I’m not sure it’s right to use “she” throughout as our audience is primarily men and I don’t want to undermine the good impression Trampoline makes through a writing style that could alienate them. My compromise is to put women first. We’ve been second for too long. Incidentally, I encountered the only drop-down list of titles in online shopping I’ve ever seen at work. It was on Sainsbury’s supermarket. Depressing, much?

Moral of the story? I am glad that woman called Trampoline out and I wish I had an answer for her. Speaking up is always better than remaining quiet. At Portland airport on Sunday I saw a woman with a canvas bag that read “Speak your mind – even if your voice shakes”. These words are from Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Grey Panthers. I will now decline from the opportunity for a rounded, cosy “together we can change the world” conclusion. I’m not convinced it’s that easy, but I’d be pleased if you inferred that logic and acted accordingly.

(This article is republished from the FASTForward blog where I’m a guest contributor)

This is my maiden posting for FASTForward so I’d like to thank the organisers for inviting me to write here. I’m CEO of Trampoline Systems, an enterprise social computing business in London (UK). My background is in the social sciences and in particular the discipline of ethnography; so my interest is primarily in human and organisational factors rather than pure algorithms. Life as CEO of a high-growth technology startup is exciting but somewhat relentless, so my postings here will probably not be frequent. However I’ll do my best to comment on interesting trends and possibilities I observe in the course of speaking to customers and colleagues in the hope this will be of interest to FASTForward readers.

For this first post I’m going to pick out a handful of the developments I think will be significant in 2008. Obviously this is a mug’s game since humans have such a rotten record of predicting the future. But here goes:

1. Many companies will commission pilots of “Facebook for the enterprise”. Most will fail to deliver any value. The meteoric adoption of Facebook by corporate users during the first half of 2007 did more than anything else to boost executive consciousness of social networking. For vendors like Trampoline this has been enormously helpful. Previously most of our conversations had to start with an explanation of the basic concepts. Now we can generally get straight to discussing the business value. However in 2008 we’re also going to see some negative outcomes from the Facebook phenomenon. Executives who have witnessed the rise of consumer social networking and sensed it may have significant implications for their business may make a knee-jerk response and instruct their IT team to instal a pilot implementation of “Facebook for the enterprise”. Established vendors and new entrants alike will rush to offer products that either plug into Facebook itself or provide a carbon copy of the platform with increased security to meet enterprise needs. However a lot of these pilots will fail to deliver value and will be abandoned. There will be two reasons for the failures. First, they will be based on the incorrect assumption that social networking techniques which work well in the consumer world will be equally successful in the enterprise. In fact it’s clear that the value of social networking in the enterprise is radically different than in the consumer world and substantially different techniques are consequently required. Second, the pilots will too often be set up without connection to a pressing business problem. This means there will be little urgency around the use of the new tools and little benefit to employees from adopting them. Many pilots of this kind will see enthusiastic adoption by 5% of the user community whilst the other 95% takes little or no notice.
2. Microsoft Sharepoint will gain rapid adoption as a surrogate for social computing. In 2008 a lot of businesses will be interested in social computing but nervous about implementing unfamiliar technologies. Microsoft Sharepoint is ideally placed as a “safe haven” for such businesses. Sharepoint opens up a degree of emergent structure and collaboration without rocking the boat. It slots into the familiar Microsoft product universe. In its 2008 guise it even presses some “social” buttons with wiki and blog functionality (though I wonder how many businesses will actually use these). Some businesses will find that Sharepoint takes them as far as they want to go. Many others will find its limitations frustrating and will go on to implement fully-fledged social computing solutions. Either way Sharepoint adoption is going to sky-rocket during 2008.
3. The first social computing applications to target specific business problems will appear. Up to now enterprise social computing has been limited to social networking platforms, blogs and wikis. These are all generic product categories with more-or-less universal application. 2008 will mark an important point of maturity in the sector with the launch of the first technologies that use social computing techniques to address specific business problems. These products will have little to do with social networking or content creation. Each one will be relevant only to a very specific vertical market or role. I don’t know what these applications will be and this is really my most speculative prediction; but I’ve got a strong hunch we’re going to see it happen during 2008.
4. “Enterprise Social Computing” will gain ground as an umbrella term alongside “Social Networking” and “Enterprise 2.0”. Words play a crucial role in the rise of any emerging technology. They provide handles that enable people to grasp and discuss unfamiliar ideas. They function as a useful shorthand for underlying phenomena that are often complex. Such terminology is inevitably in flux. As the technology develops and product categories begin to crystalise, new phrases emerge to describe the changing picture. There’s already been a slew of terms since 2000. “Social Software” was the first generic term used to describe blogs and wikis. “Web 2.0” was coined by Tim O’Reilly as a wider description of the socialisation of the consumer web. Andrew McAfee defined “Enterprise 2.0” to discuss how a parallel process would impact businesses systems. “Social Networking” is a long-standing academic term that took on a new meaning with the rise of Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn and Facebook. Another academic term, “Social Graph”, came into general currency with the launch of OpenSocial. However none of these terms offers an umbrella description for the overall technology phenomenon and the need for such a term is growing rapidly. Over the last three months I’ve noticed a lot of people starting to use the phrases “Social Computing” and “Enterprise Social Computing”. These seem to be good umbrella terms and I find myself using them increasingly in preference to other terms. I suspect that Enterprise Social Computing will emerge during 2008 as a stable term for this new generation of business systems.

So those are my predictions for the next twelve months. All that remains is for me to wish FASTForward readers an exciting and rewarding year.

Trampoline has been selected as one of the UK’s top 25 young technology companies to present at the English Tech Tour 2007. The English Tech Tour is the 27th Euro Tech Tour and takes place in London, Southampton and Manchester from 17-19th October 2007. It will showcase the UK’s most promising technology companies to an audience of venture capitalists, corporations and institutional investors.

Charles Armstrong, CEO of Trampoline Systems, will be giving a presentation introducing Trampoline and our views on the future of enterprise software on Thursday 18th October at the National Oceonography Centre, Southampton.

The nights are drawing in, there’s a chill in Trampoline HQ… must be time to embark on a new round of conference appearances! Charles Armstrong, Trampoline’s CEO, is going to be venturing far and wide over the next couple of months, speaking at three events in Europe and the US.

At ETRE Charles will be giving a corporate presentation, introducing the conference attendees to Trampoline and his views on the future of enterprise software. You can catch him at 3:30pm on Monday 8th October. The conference itself is taking place from 7-10th October in Budapest, Hungary.

In November its off to the US for two more conferences. Defrag is in it its first year and looks set to be a hot event, exploring the space that lives in between knowledge management, “social” networking, collaboration and business intelligence - just the space Trampoline’s technology sits in. Charles is taking part in a panel session on Social Networking in the Enterprise at 1:15 pm on Monday 5th November.

It’s then time for a short hop to San Jose for KM World and Intranets. The theme for this year is KM 2.0: A New World for the Enterprise and the conference program will be exploring new ways to exchange knowledge within the enterprise. Charles is going to be opening the track Enterprise of the Future: Strategies at 10:30am on Wednesday 7th November with a session entitled Enterprise 2.0: Enterprise of the Future.

Since we started using our own internal Sonar deployment as a test bed, we’ve been noticing a subtle but distinct shift in the way we compose emails. We’re taking just a little bit more care to write informative subjects and supply more context, whether we’re consciously aware of it or not.

One of the main characteristics of the email noise that pervades the enterprise is a lack of persistent context. I long ago lost count of the number of hours of lost on fruitless trawls through my inbox for some nugget of information that I *know* is there, languishing in some long-forgotten recess of my mail client, but I just can’t find it because it’s lost in a morass of meaningless subjects, like “meeting notes”, or “tomorrow”, or – everyone’s favourite – “Re:”. A communication medium such as email, without the situational or emotional context that is generally inferred from ambient knowledge such as a previous verbal conversation followed up with an email, or from the non-verbal clues that provide up to 80% of our meaning, can inevitably lead to serious misunderstandings or just….. noise. A potential goldmine of crucial information – somebody’s inbox – quickly becomes a black hole of knowledge that can never be found again.

What we’re finding since implementing Sonar is that the knowledge that our emails are going to be processed and have themes extracted from them is making us – consciously or subconsciously – put that little bit of extra thought into providing that context in our sentence construction. It only takes a second to change a subject line like “meeting notes” to “notes from production meeting”, or change “tomorrow” to “tomorrow’s development tasks”, but that extra context makes the world of difference when you’re dredging back through your inbox, months down the line.

It also means that the picture of organisational expertise that Sonar can build up can be rich, informative, and ever-evolving. It’s changing the way we communicate, in subtly varied ways, making us provide more relevant information and, frankly, cut out the crap – and that, to my mind, can only be a good thing.