Stewart Mader blogs atWikiConsulting.com

Dennis Howlett writes about a recent NPD Group survey that measured web-based vs. traditional office apps. It showed relatively little use of web-based tools compared to traditional apps like Excel, Word, etc. He suggests that this is only a small part of a much larger story about the pace of innovation among business-focused software tools vs. consumer software offerings. Here are the four factors he says explain the current state of web-based vs. desktop business tools:

1. “Enterprise attention on Web 2.0 (hate the expression but…) applications like blogs and wikis, the majority of which are offered as online solutions, is intensifying.” - ’nuff said. This trend will continue next year, and simply increase the market for these tools.
2. “Microsoft has a sleeping beast in its Windows Live Spaces product line.” - I think what he’s saying here is that when Microsoft puts serious emphasis on web-based office apps - and by serious I mean they start actually selling them to customers as a partial (eventually significant) complement or replacement to traditional desktop apps - then the awareness of web-based apps will rise dramatically.
3. “There is room for many players. The new players don’t need to win market control to enjoy a handsome living and serve customers well. Whether that happens is moot.” - Great point. It’s not a zero-sum game, and companies developing blog and wiki software, social bookmarking tools, etc. should be focused on getting - and pleasing - a portion of the market. There’s no need for them to focus on trying to kill the competition.
4. “If the current Gen Y/M is truly enamored of online applications and the freedoms that Facebook, Google Apps and the like offer, they will bring the change that tips online towards mass adoption.” - Here, he makes the point that users will choose the tools that they feel most comfortable using, regardless of what the enterprise chooses to provide for them.

His closing is excellent: “In the meantime, I’m one of those weirdos who lives in The Cloud. None of my clients do but it doesn’t matter. We get stuff done. Some even enjoy collaborative document editing in Google Docs. Who would have ever thought that possible?” Essentially, he’s saying that this isn’t a zero-sum game. People are using different tools right now, and that’s fine right now.

Over time, as more people use web-based tools, things may simply get easier and more efficient. But even as they choose to use web-based tools, they may choose products from different vendors, so the need to co-exist will steill be there. On top of that, the capability to easily move data between tools, rather than locking into one platform will be an important differentiator between products that succeed and those that don’t.

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In this edition of the Friday Flux: John Dean writes about doing research on the Internet. “It’s a wonderful first-person account of his use of TPM Cafe (a forum for readers of the political blog Talking Points Memo) to find information that proved elusive when he used traditional research methods; his exploration of Wikipedia, and his reflection that many of the tech-savvy people he’s told about collaborative, open-source information sources are just as ignorant of them as he was until he started exploring.”

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Andrew McAfee recently wrote a post called How to Hit the Enterprise 2.0 Bullseye that looks at how multiple tools like wikis, blogs, and social networks are useful to workers in complementary ways. He defines a bullseye and set of concentric cirles that represent the typical worker’s ties to others as strong, weak, potential, and none, then shows how each tool is most useful at a particular ring in the bullseye. For example:

“Evidence suggests that wikis let strongly-tied collaborators get their work done better, faster, and with more agility than was previous possible. With a wiki, what’s emergent is the document itself, with ‘document’ defined broadly.”

For weak connections, he explains that the benefit of maintaining a social network is keeping updated on connections and being able to see when the potential for a stronger connection emerges. He gives the exmple of a Facebok status update that let him know a contact was accompanying a foreign head of state to a meeting on technology issues.

“…as a result of his Facebook update, which took him about ten seconds to type and me one second to read, I now know who to reach out to should I ever want to dive into European IT issues, or desire an invitation to the Elysee Palace . SNS lets its users build bridges to new human networks, and to let non-redundant information emerge.”

For the potential connections - the outer ring in the concentric circle - he suggests blogs:

“And what about all the people in the third ring of the circle in the figure— the potentially valuable colleagues who our knowledge worker just hasn’t met yet? Wikis and SNS in their current configurations don’t help her learn of the existence of such people, but an internal corporate blogosphere could.”

If a critical mass of blogging is cultivated in an organization, it creates an information flow for people to tap into by setting up searches for topics of interest, then monitoring RSS feeds of blogs they find useful.

There are multiple ways to use wikis, blogs, and social networks to be better informed, share your knowledge and expertise, and find others who share your interests. Regardless of how you use them - and it’s to your benefit to investigate them and find the uses that suit you - Andrew has offered an excellent rationale for their value.

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In Facing up to Facebook (PDF), the UK Trades Union Congress offers some advice to HR staff regarding employee use of social networks at work: “Employees have a right to a personal life, and provided they do not breach reasonable conduct guidelines, employers should respect this…A responsible way to handle this is for employers to negotiate a reasonable conduct policy with employee representatives, and make it clear to them what is expected of them in their private lives, both offline and online.”

Shiv Singh offers an excellent response that ends with, “Don’t control unless there’s an absolute need to control.” He’s right. If employers venture into the gray territory of telling employees “what is expected of them in their private lives” the approach will backfire and employees will think twice about contributing anything to any tool the employer uses, wiki included.

A later paragraph takes a much more reasoned approach: “The current media hype is sometimes unhelpful and may encourage employers to waste time on imaginary problems, when an honest and open conduct policy, coupled with a hands-off approach to employees’ personal lives could avoid unnecessarily damaging relations with the workforce.” The bottom line with this document is it’s waffling on both sidea of this issue. The bottom line for organizations:

1. Trust your employees
2. Keep tools open
3. Only restrict or control when necessary
4. Don’t make decisions that affect your organization based on hype about things that happen on the open Web.

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This edition: Debunking three lies about social software. This post looks at JP Rangaswami’s take on three lies about social software: 1) it causes groupthink, 2) it is full of inaccuracies, and 3) it destroys privacy. After summarizing his three debunks, I offered some thoughts on how these lies about social software sometimes affect wiki use: “…this is the lie that stops most faculty from using the wiki. They mistakenly think that to use a wiki is to make all of one’s work open to anyone else to edit, but once this point is clarified and they realize they can choose what is editable (i.e. group project, collaborative paper) and what is only readable (i.e. syllabus, course schedule) they become very willing to use the tool.”

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In the September issue of Men’s Vogue, writer Michael Specter says of the iPhone, and Apple’s emphasis on design: “You can count on one hand the number of American corporations that take design seriously. There is target and Knoll, and then there is Apple…People want to make phone calls, but they also want to play with their music and look at pretty pictures. They want to have fun. Apple has shown it is possible. More than that, they have reminded us that elegance matters.”

Earlier in the piece, he says, “It is hard to make something simple.” Indeed. It is hard because most people think about design last - after the engineering, after the feature lists, and after trying to include enough to theoretically please everybody. What gets lost in the shuffle is careful thought about and attention to how things should work together, how they should feel to the person who uses them everyday, and gets to be intimately familiar with their functions, and shortcomings. “People aren’t looking for the interface to be exciting. They’re looking to it to be fast, reliable, and easy to use.” Jim Buckmaster, Craigslist CEO

For technology tools, creating buzz about something is easy, but creating something that generates its own buzz, and keeps that buzz going because people are genuinely excited about it, is a bit harder. In the long run, though, it’s the latter group that are the real game changers. This excerpt from an article about the iPhone helps explain why:
“That love-hate relationship we have with cell phones underlies the depth of our involvement with technology itself. Our everyday tools are the stuff of 1950s science-fiction novels. But though the digital age has widely expanded our abilities, the difficulty of accomplishing these tasks with ease often leaves us frustrated. When something comes along that promises to fulfill our ambitions, we pay attention. And when that something also promises to perform its duties with beauty and pizzazz—Apple’s trademarks—we get a visceral buzz that’s as much artistic enthusiasm as consumerism.” Why We Went Nuts About the iPhone, Steven Levy

The reason that people who use wikis become extremely passionate advocates - like Apple fans - and stoke successful grassroots growth in organizations is that they’re simple and understandable. People get how to use them very quickly, and genuinely like that they don’t have to fight with the wiki to do what they want. So wikis get used during projects (instead of after the fact), and the more they get used, the more their use grows because they become hubs for knowledge, interaction, and collaboration. An elegant experience goes a long way in making this possible.

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This is a must read. Jason gets to the point of why Enterprise software is so hard to use - it’s made to appeal to buyers, not users. “The people who buy enterprise software aren’t the people who use enterprise software. That’s where the disconnect begins. And it pulls and pulls and pulls until the user experience is split from the buying experience so severely that the software vendors are building for the buyers, not the users. The experience takes a back seat to the feature list, future promises, and buzz words.”

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The Friday Flux is a new weekly series in which I’ll highlight a post from the archives on this blog. The idea for this stemmed from a recent post in which I highlighed an excellent post Dennis and Jeremiah Owyang wrote which is almost two years old but still as good as ever. Finding, and writing about, that post made me realize that when using a temporal mechanism like blogs, we shouln’t just let posts disappear into the archives - we should re-read and reflect on them as time passes.

The name “The Friday Flux” was inspired by the Flux Capacitor, the device “Doc” Emmett Brown described as “what makes time travel possible” in the DeLorean Time Machine he and Marty McFly used for time travel in Back to the Future.

This week’s flux is a post I wrote in August 2006: Wiki and the Memetic Marketplace. Enjoy!

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When I visit wiki users in organizations, I often hear stories about how the wiki was brought in by someone who saw the value in using it, and began a grassroots movement to spread awareness and use of it. Not the orthodox way to bring a tool into an organization, because it often leaves IT out of the process until the use of the tool is already underway. It’s happening this way because people are choosing what works best for them, and resisting the idea that they have to use the one tool that’s prescribed as a “one size fits all” solution.

Multiple tools can coexist, and letting people choose can help identify the better tool for their particular needs in the long run. One of the reasons why content and knowledge management systems haven’t been so successful is that they meet the needs of one group pretty well, but aren’t so good for others, so they never reach the level of use that would justify their high cost (once you realize this, it can make you feel slightly duped wondering why software companies would sell something for one group at such a high price, and hide it by claiming it’s a tool for everyone).

The other reason they don’t reach widespread use is simply because the intrinsic push to do something - the internal desire - is a far stronger motivation to start - and keep - doing something. Time and time again people in organizations say to me “we love the wiki, but we have this other tool that’s been mandated as the official solution and we don’t like it as much.” Extrinsic force - when people are told to do something - doesn’t even come close to internal motivation to do something.

Chris Anderson wrote a post about this topic, titled The black wire and the white wire in which he describes the two network cables on his desk - one installed by central IT and the other a standard DSL connection with no firewall, and no ports blocked for things like Skype and Second Life: “These two cables are a handy metaphor for the two worlds of corporate computing: end users and the IT department. The chasm between them has never been greater, in part because the tools available on the wide open web have never been better.”

This is what creates the conflict between users and IT - and it’s not all IT’s fault either. Historically, IT’s job is to “keep the lights on” - make a set of core technology tools available to people and support them - which was fine ten, even five, years ago, but just doesn’t work the same today. The quality of tools on the web is increasing far faster than most “boxed” enterprise software, and those web tools are free or low cost, and available immediately, as opposed to going through a much more involved procedure to get access to tools on the inside, or convince IT to make them available.

“Hence my two cables–in a sense, my computing ego and id. Scratch most companies and their employees and you’ll find the same. So why not build IT infrastructure that reflects the reality that one size doesn’t fit all? To encourage experimentation at the edge while protecting operations in the core, two networks work better than one.” This is the philosophy organizations need to embrace going forward - one size doesn’t fit all, and a better way is to maintain - in the black cable sense - only those tools that are highly specialized or tied to legal/government regulation (things like risk analysis software for insurance companies, and financial reporting software for financial services firms come to mind). This frees both IT and employees to try - in the white cable sense - a variety of tools like blogs & wikis to find what works best for them and what they’re intrinsically motivated to use.

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Over on the Atlassian Blog, my colleague John Rotenstein has written an excellent post exploring the differences between Wikipedia and wikis as used in organizations. In Wikipedia is not the real world, John looks at a series of misconceptions about wikis, such as “It’ll be vandalised!”, “I don’t want people editing whatever they want!”, “A wiki is fine for reference material, but not for communication”, “I don’t want people wasting their time posting silly information”, and “My staff would never use a wiki!”. To counter these, he offers good, solid arguments that show why these statements are mostly borne of fear and misunderstanding of wikis, and finishes the post by directing those looking to encourage wiki adoption to Wikipatterns.com.

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