We’ve been discussing the issue highlighted by this posting internally. I think that the question boils down to this:

Do people currently feel so proprietary about their professional connections that they feel their connections must remain confidential to remain professionally competitive?

In the fairly recent past some have certainly felt this way, but the interent is radically changing that. Search, social networks and the massive increase of data available online to anyone makes it much easier to find people and things. This is causing our understanding and appreciation of relationships to change back to the way things were much longer ago…

It’s 1500, somewhere in Europe. Everyone in town knows the blacksmith; so what? The interesting questions were much more complex and contextual - eg who would the blacksmith let slide on payments? Who does the blacksmith socialize with? Is the farrier in town profesionally cooperative with the blacksmith, or is she a competitor?

Preserving knowledge of the existence of nodes in a social network as if they are proprietary IP and must remain obfuscated is an “old school” modern business behavior. It implies that the node on the other end would be happy to deal in the same manner with anyone, and as such it devalues the relationship to such a great extent that you have to wonder if there’s a relationship there at all.

Economies based on this kind of artificial scarcity are excessively vulnerable in a modern age of search and the internet.

Back when I ran a paintball field, and long before the interwebz had search, I found a source for the smoke grenades that most of us sold at our fields in WA state. It was hard to find this guy; he was in the Midwest somewhere and it took about 3 or 4 people hops and lots of phone chatting to get to him.

Once I did find him I was able to buy the grenades in fairly small numbers - say a case at a time - and sell them at a significant mark-up while still under-cutting my local competition. In essence I became a regional distributor. It was a good deal for me and for the other guy.

However he owed me nothing and he just wanted to move product, and so ANYONE who found him could get the same deal I got. Eventually someone did, which cut my regional advantage down to nothing. I still got a good price, but ultimately what happened was the regional price re-set so that we all got close to the same markup of a buck or so a grenade.

These days, that kind of advantage is tremendously fleeting. What matters is relationships themselves, and how they are nurtured over time. If just know who I talk to makes you directly competitive with me, then I am not doing my job.

I understand that sales relationships can be different animals than other kinds of relationships, and that sales people can feel very proprietary about their network. Inside Trampoline we’ve been very fortunate in that Adrian and the rest of the sales team treat our sales relationships as long-term investments which aren’t prone to being under-mined by other people simply knowing about them.

This happens to align nicely with our overall view of relationships - it’s not only who you know but also how you know them that matters.

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.

It’s Wednesday afternoon at Enterprise 2.0. In spite of a few frustrating failures in infrastructure, it’s been a really great two days here at E2 for Trampoline.  

Right now I’m sitting in the EMC booth stealing their hardline because WiFi is down (again) and our hardline is down (again). Evidently Enterprise 2.0 still doesn’t mean reliable internet connections or badge readers which, like, read badges.

Ironically even the toasters on the breakfast bar this morning were teh fail and I had to steal one and jack it into a power strip inside one of the breakout rooms to toast my bagel. (Which, by the way, was artfully sliced to look like the victim of a drunken accident with a chainsaw. Not that I am in the least bit picky about my toasting. Oh no, not me.)

The deepest irony about the toasters was that during the “Evening in the Cloud” event several speakers likened cloud computing to needing to be as predictable, reliable and standards-driven as our electricity supply, clearly tempting fate and cursing the event and my breakfast toasting.

New England is in the middle of one of the weirdest early June weather fronts in history with temperatures in the high 90’s and huge thunder-storms and even tornado warnings, and really, there’s only one company on the planet to blame all of this on…

I blame google, of course.

I hereby declare that cloud computing evangelists are no longer to be taken seriously if they liken their services to electricity. In fact you should probably immediately take proactive de-cursing actions lest you find yourself suddenly in a region-wide freak weather phenom, total blackout or starring in a real-life version of I Am Legend.

Adrian, Steve Ardire and I worked the booth yesterday (with occasional support from Rebecca and Jules, who had lots to do on the party and so were constantly jetting about the hotel alternatively solving herculean problems and looking wistfully out the window at the sailboats).

The booth experience was very, very interesting. As always Adrian was the companies greatest low-key evangelist and gave great demo while Steve managed little micro-demos on his mac off on the side. (The people Steve talked to all left with a very pleased but somewhat dazed look in their eyes.) We were 2 or 3 rows deep for most of the day, even when all we had was Rebecca’s awesome slide deck because our hardline to the internet was dead (as were most booths) Tuesday morning.

The people who have visited us at the booth have been uniformly smart and enthusiastic and ask really great questions. While some folks are clearly still just looking and thinking (which is fine) the interest level at this show in real solutions to current enterprise problems is very high. So ++ on SONAR Server, Dashboard and Flightdeck.

When I joined Trampoline we were still supporting a product called “Collaboration Engine” which dated back to the earliest days of the company. It did what our customers wanted it to and it was also decent revenue, however when I looked at the product, talked with the team about it and then looked around at the marketplace and compared it to where other folks seemed to be headed, I recommended that we should cut it completely.

Why? Because I thought then that everybody would be doing “collaboration software” and it would become increasingly difficult to clearly differentiate our collaboration offering from others in this space. Collaboration in an enterprise means getting many many things right and it means potentially competing with experienced and/or entrenched competitors. There are clearly vendors here who are doing this well (IBM Connections is looking very slick, while Jive is here as well) and others who are highly entrenched (MS is here with SharePoint).

Most of the people I’ve spoken with told me “wow. Everyone else showing here is doing the same thing as eachother except for you. Your stuff is cool!” This was a really important bit of feedback and was very rewarding to hear. It’s nice to be told that you don’t look exactly the same as everybody else and to be appreciate for what you think you are doing well. People seem to really appreciate that we don’t build wiki, group, IM, email, workspace and blogging software but that we do make it much easier to build profiles to find people, skills and interests across large groups of people, and to visualize networks in interesting and engaging ways.

Wikis are clearly hot and there are lots of wiki companies here doing some neat stuff and again, glad they are doing it and doing it well, also very glad to not be “another wiki company”.

I don’t think that anyone one else at this show is eating email and automagically producing and maintaining user profiles of themes and connections, and lots of potential customers are noticing that this is what we do and they like it. It’s really refreshing.

Many of the vendors here at the show have come by and asked us about our upcoming API as they see what we are doing as very complimentary to their offerings. We can make collaboration tools like email and wikis work better. All cool.

The party last night was very good. Massive props to Rebecca; she kept her cool and created a really nice event. It was probably the nicest conference drinking event I’ve ever been to (and really, I’ve been to LOTS. Like, way more than 100), and that’s in spite of having to “work it” in the sense that we paid for it and so it was clearly soft marketing for us. It was really chill and fun and intimate and the music was good and people really seemed to be having a good time. Charles did a neat presentation on St. Agnes that was as interesting and low-key as the rest of the party.

As near as I can tell folks had lots of fun, and when Boston’s finest came they didn’t see the burned furniture or the donkey, so it was all good. (Okay, just kidding about some of that.)

Note to conference party planners – more money and more drinking and famous bands don’t always make for a better party. Try for intimate and fun and get fun smart people to show up. Think of the best non-work parties you’ve ever been to – they probably were way less over the top than the next conference party you are planning.  

So – despite the hiccups it’s been a great event. I’m really glad we are here.

We’ve all been on our feet all day again, but for the booth at least we are in the home stretch – just one more session on the demo floor for of boothy goodness! W007!

(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.

By 2015 large corporates will be moving en masse to a decentralized client computing environment based on laptops (or their kin) owned by users with time and usage leased back by their corporate masters. This will mark the era of the loosely-coupled enterprise (LCE).

This means virtualization, obviously. If your kid runs ‘torrent and you manage payroll, well, that could introduce some issues. You’ll need secure hardware to sit under your VM’s, and that means secure input, secure ouptput, TPM’s and isolated execution in every box. Der. This is needed to provide security against root-kits which do stuff like screen-scrape and keystroke log. You need to be “invulnerable” enough to rooting so that the coming wave of ever-more-sophisticated and targeted 0 day roots are manageable as per-VM annoyances rather than per-system nightmares.

All this HW-rooted-ness implies some form of federated vouchsafing-in-the-sky so that someone somewhere can make an intelligent decision about what to trust and when, to do something they care about. Reputation systems for SW, users and HW makes a lot of sense here. To prevent MITM attacks corporations will need a way to prove to users that they are who they say they are, so that means a much better, clearer identity for a corporation. Users will need a strong, accountable identity which they can “own” outside of the context of the strong, accountable identity their coporation owns.

When virtualization and decentralization come to pass then I can see one hell of a lot more Apple in wage-earner hands. I was talking to a certain Very Large Bank the other day and they claimed that one year ago they were very bullish on MSFT, but after looking at Vista for a year and doing a west-coast tour of all the obvious players, they are re-thinking their entire desktop strategy. They are saying they plan to chuck MSFT and go APPLE for the entire enterprise. That’s an OMG if I ever heard one.

If that’s true, it would be a mind-blowing sea-change and should cause EA/SA-focused sales folks at MSFT to completely wig out. The fact that this bank was even willing to mention it to me means they aren’t being laughed out of the room within their own company, and that is stunning. Apple in an enterprise? Woah. Virtualization is key here as it means you don’t have to forgoe Windows, you just put it in it’s own little box.

(If Apple had an ultra-mobile with a TPM 1.2 and a TCG-compliant BIOS to run BitLocker, I’d probably be using it right now. I admit it. But they don’t and I can get way more computer in a Lenovo that handles a drop test from way higher than any Apple…)

I see web-based everything with data getting cached all over the place. Local HD’s become simply the third (fourth?) fastest cache on my desk as part of a giant replicated cloud-o-networked data. Data becomes very boring, while knowledge and relationships (personal networks for you web geeks) become incredibly important.

Sooner or later Google will figure enterprises out and give MSFT proper competition, which could make Office usable again, among other things. (Wouldn’t that be nice?).

Google has pointedly started to work on phones, it would be really nice if they decided to focus on buiness phones, rather than on dashing themselves against the rocks of the cliffs of iPhone. Blackberry needs some real competition and it’s a great market to go after.

However I’m NOT predicting that, teh Googly kidz will make fonez for temselves, and tat means webby phonez with pics and kool stuphs.

Maybe they will make phones for the next 1B netizens, that would be really cool. Apple sure isn’t going to get the next 1B phone sales. MSFT may spend the next 3 years trying to de-cool Apple and failing, that would certainly be normal for both companies.

I think we will see a rebound effect AWAY from large cities for information workers as they realize that, now that the coporation is de-centralizing and they don’t have to be at the same office every day, they can have a pasture, chickens, dogs and dirt for their kids to get all over their faces, rather than an awful IKEA-esque nightmare of modern non-design. Neal Stephenson’s burbo-claves except fuelled by bio-diesel and with organic craft cheese.

Highly de-centralized businesses are less prone to things like terrorist attacks and pandemic plagues, too, which is a nice fringe benefit. Good luck to all you terrorists planning to attack Whitefish Montana. You go, I can’t wait to read about it.

All this implies a high-degree of webbiness, which means more interesting stuff much faster at some levels - but it may also mean REDUCED innovation in the underlying platform as applications become more and more portable, and thus more and more abstracted, and thus less and less interested in platform-specific capabilities.

What else? We will need a new (old) management theory, I’ll have a post on that later.

After my presentation at last month’s Web Essentials event hosted by Library House I was asked whether I thought Facebook would be widely adopted as a social networking platform inside the enterprise. This is an interesting question as it touches on the different underlying requirements for consumer and enterprise applications. Facebook is currently getting strong adoption from business folk, something that MySpace and Friendster never achieved. Last week Siemens’ inhouse web strategist disclosed that 6,000 of Siemens’ employees were already on Facebook and most of them had joined during the previous month. This led Robert Scoble to suggest that the company might soon be producing dedicated apps for the platform and that in time Facebook could even replace Siemens’ intranet.

Facebook as a replacement for the corporate intranet? It’s an intriguing thought, but I think Mr Scoble is wrong on this. There are three main barriers:

Insufficient Security and Privacy Options
Part of Facebook’s triumph is its simple (but subtle) permissions system. As a user I can choose whether my profile page is visible to everyone or just my friends. Groups can be open to everyone, their content can be restricted to members or they can be completely invisible. I can also associate a group with a network such as a school or business. People can easily grasp these authorisation options and they offer enough range to cover most social preferences. However they don’t offer the level of granularity or sophistication needed for serious enterprise usage. Businesses have a wide variety of security and privacy policies and every internal system needs conform to them 100%. There’s no margin for error or compromise where highly sensitive information is concerned. Security and privacy are peripheral functions for a consumer platform they are absolutely central for an enterprise platform.
Too Reliant on Manual Updating
Facebook, in common with other consumer social networking platforms, relies on manually entered data to build up a picture of who your friends are and what you’re interested in. This works fine for social purposes, where updating profiles and friend lists becomes a leisure activity in its own right. But this isn’t true in the enterprise. Systems that rely on manual updating (such as knowledge management tools based on tagging) tend to deliver limited value in the enterprise for the simple reason that people never get round to updating them. To deliver sustained value, enterprise social networking platforms must have automatic mechanisms to update themselves and maintain an accurate picture of people’s networks and interests.
No Integration with Enterprise Systems
Enabling third-party developers to write plug-ins (or “Apps”) for Facebook has made a huge contribution to its success. My Facebook page includes a random selection of my photos imported from my Flickr account, details of the artists I’ve been listening to on LastFM (with a button to play my personal radio station) and links to the last six entries from my personal blog. It’s easy for Facebook to link with other consumer platforms like this because they all share simple authorisation models and the data being exchanged isn’t sensitive. However the sources an enterprise needs to integrate with, such as their corporate email system and document repository, hold extremely sensitive material and have sophisticated authorisation regimes that must stringently be adhered to. This isn’t what Facebook was designed for.

These issues don’t mean that Facebook has no role in business. Far from it. I think Facebook could well replace dedicated business networking services such as LinkedIn. Indeed I’ve already made a number of valuable business connections through Facebook. But the very factors that underlie Facebook’s success in the consumer world limit its application inside the enterprise. If it had been designed for enterprise needs it wouldn’t be seeing such wide adoption in the consumer world. In the end it’s horses for courses.

Apparently Jeff Pulver has stopped using LinkedIn for business social networking. This comes on the back of various other luminaries doing the same and predicting the replacement of LinkedIn by Facebook as the defacto Enterprise networking platform. I think they’re missing the point. Not all ‘friends’ are created equal; socialising and networking are two distinct activities. The divide between the two groups has decidedly fuzzy edges but it still exists.

I used MySpace for networking within the music and art communities. Many of my ‘friends’ were random strangers whose music I enjoyed or artwork I liked. LinkedIn is very similar. While I know most of my contacts I’m not necessarily friends with all of them. On Facebook, however, I know every person in my friends list. Incidentally, I think the term ‘friend’ is far more suited to Facebook than it is to MySpace and that’s why it’s taking off so virulently - the behaviour it encourages is far closer to that which we display in real life. Sociomimetic, Charles?

Facebook mimics my offline social network. I know everyone in it and keep up with them either directly - a drink after work or an email exchange - or indirectly, through other friends. I still do the former but Facebook has taken over the information distribution role of the latter. LinkedIn, on the other hand, substitutes for the stack of business cards I have mouldering on my shelves and collection of half-recollected email addresses that languish in my address book. These aren’t people I necessarily keep in touch with frequently but I certainly don’t want to forget about them.

LinkedIn is a network but it’s not really social. It’s about collecting not interacting and that’s how I want my networking to be. I don’t put my friends and my business associates in the same bucket. There’s some overlap (everyone at Trampoline is in my friends list, for example) but I certainly don’t want to turn the CEO of the company I was consulting for last year into a zombie. It’s simply not appropriate.

I’m definitely not saying that Facebook has no place in the enterprise - I expect it to function like a virtual coffee machine or water cooler - but I don’t think the form of socialising that it promotes necessarily threatens LinkedIn. In fact, I think the two could play very well together… A LinkedIn Facebook app, anyone?