Socialtext

At the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston I was struck by a few things:

• There were a LOT of serious businesses (and government organizations) there, and the customer attendance numbers were up significantly from last year. I was particularly impressed by how many companies sent more than one people to the conference and how well-prepared they were.
  
• It was amusing to watch a bunch of Twitter addicts go into withdrawal because the hotel's WiFi was so dysfunctional.
  
•  Customers seem to be moving from "what is it" to "what can I do with it" to "I have a problem identified and am looking for solutions".

It's this last trend that's crucial. This is what transforms an emerging technology category into a sustainable wave that creates success for both customers and for vendors. I'm hoping we can collectively move that trend along by moving the conversation to a pragmatic plane.

• There's real enterprise initiative stuff underneath the huge numbers. Most of the buzz that swirls around this space gets buried behind the really big growth forecasts and vendor buzz - but remember that these numbers come from real research and trends. Forrester analyst G. Oliver Young wrote last month that "56% of North American and European enterprises consider Web 2.0 to be a priority in 2008. A recent survey conducted by AIIM about Enterprise 2.0 applications found that 44 percent of businesses find the technologies "imperative" or "of significant importance" to their organizations.  
  

• Buy-side trends and customer success stories show it's not just buzz -- The barriers to Enterprise 2.0 are still strong. But Holbrook said hostile attitudes toward the technologies are changing. This year, he said, Enterprise 2.0 just might break free of its buzzword status. "I've seen a big shift over the last year or so where is becoming much more enterprise focused. It's no longer kind of a phenomenon. It's a trend that has legs and is not just buzz." Better still are a number of actual customer case studies hitting the market that show real results.
  

Innovation is coming back to the Enterprise.

I've had lots of conversations recently with people who are most jazzed by the Enterprise 2.0 wave because innovation and VC investment in the enterprise market has been so overshadowed by the consumer side of Web 2.0 When was the last truly innovative trend to affect end users in enterprises?
 
The Enterprise 2.0 movement is generating so much innovative energy - both on the vendor side (startups and large companies alike) and on the customer side - that it was the first time in years that I saw this much enthusiasm about enterprise software.

I'll be writing more about this in the next days and weeks and will flesh out some more reflections on what we're seeing in the market - obstacles, opportunities, and best practices.

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CIO Magazine just published an article "How a Marketing Firm Implemented an Enterprise Wiki" based on an interview with Neil Callahan, President of CoActive Digital.  It's a well-written article with some great sound bites from Neil, and I thought I would point out my favorite bits.  These are some great patterns of success that we try to model with most of our customers.

The business leader led

What excites me the most about this Socialtext customer story is that this whole initiative was driven with business problems and issues in mind, and that the business leader (Neil) has been able to keep that perspective front and center throughout the selection, decision, first deployment, and ongoing rollout process.  I can definitely assert that this makes all the difference in social software success stories; too many times I've seen intiative stall where it was a technology team-driven initiative who then shops around looking for business sponsors.

The business leader found the right business-driven use case and team to start with

"Callahan says that moving workflows and processes from e-mail to wikis would only work if there was a good internal use case.  So he turned to his business development group."

This is spot on.  Matching the team (including the personality of that team's leader, the existing internpersonal dynamics of the group, the work culture, and the business priorities of the team) with the initiative really helps in the early days.  It's exciting to see these projects take on a life of their own - the team starts with the right initiative, there's some pre-built content and structure to help them get going, and then their "in the flow" collaboration really starts to build out the value of their workspace - and then other groups quickly take notice and follow their example.

The business leader got buy-in from the group and didn't meddle

This is a hard temptation or instinct to avoid.  I often have to advise the "Executive Sponsor" at our customers to "sponsor yes, inspect no".  In other words it's great to be a passionate and visible champion for the social software initiative at a very senior level of your organization, but be thoughtful and selective about the degree to which you insert yourself into the flow of conversation and dialog that emerges - especially early on.  (Of course there is a wide spectrum of cultural starting points; there are many places where I think executive involvement "in the flow" wouldn't be disruptive.)  Too much senior executive involvement can sometimes intimidate the rank and file from getting their feet wet and "learning in public" - which is a good thing to watch out for.

I can personally relate to this.  When I first joined Socialtext I was raring to go and get involved in everything.  I was commenting on almost every new page, asking questions, adding comments, etc., all with the intent of stimulating and encouraging open dialog, discussion, and debate.  Then someone pointed out to me that until people got to know me better some employees might be a little reluctant to engage in a public dialog with the new CEO.  I wouldn't say I "backed off" as much as "clarified my intent" more, which created a better sense of trust and productive transparency.

Come to think of it, isn't that just classic leadership learning?

 

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Nicole Ferraro of Internet Evolution posted her interview with Socialtext CEO Eugene Lee.  He discusses the launch of SocialCalc, fundamental technology changes, productivity, email, adoption and marketing.  Here's a sample:

IE: Our site focuses on the future of the Internet. How do you view the future of the Internet? What emerging or yet-to-emerge technologies will be prominent going forward? What will die out or lose influence?

Lee: I think the patterns of ubiquity of technology, the long tail of specificity, those will continue to accelerate. You'll see more and more contact services capabilities being built. What's going to be the next wave is, how do you make it relevant? You're starting to see this with blended feeds across different social networks. The first step is aggregating -- but then it's like, that's too much and not specific to the problem I'm trying to solve. So while it's nice to know someone just read this book or someone just gave someone a hug, in the work environment I want to know who just answered my question, who was tagged with the expertise I was looking for, who actually has worked with this client before and can help me with this client problem I have now. Aggregating, and then making it relevant, and managing all of that is the next sort of challenge.

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Alexander Wolfe of Wolfe's Den on Information Week posted a video on Socialtext Turns Wiki into a Killer Web Platform, including footage of me demoing the latest stuff on the tradeshow floor of Enterprise 2.0:

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Socialtext and others are happy to announce a community standard for wikis called the "Universal Edit Button." The UEB appears in your web browser's toolbar to let you know the web page you're reading is part of a wiki page. That means you can edit it!

You probably know that wikis, like Socialtext and Wikipedia, enable people to work together both more closely and at much larger scale than ever before. The UEB creates a common notification icon and a common way to "click to edit" across many more wikis across the whole web. We hope to increase the size of the read/write web, so more and more people can easily work together via wikis.

Here's how it looks in my Firefox browser:

It works by having the wiki engine include a little bit of HTML markup in each editable wiki page. Your web browser then auto-detects the markup, and displays the Universal Edit Button to let you know you can edit the page.

UEB support isn't built into browsers yet, but there is an extension for Firefox 2 and 3 available now. Check out UniversalEditButton.org to get UEB-enabled today, and then come back to any Socialtext hosted wiki (like Exchange) to see it in action!

The idea for a Universal Edit Button idea has been kicking around for a while, but it finally all came together at the 2008 RecentChangesCamp held in May at the Socialtext headquarters in Palo Alto. Big thanks to Mark Dilley and Ward Cunningham at AboutUs, Travis Derouin and Jack Herrick at wikiHow, Brion Vibber at the Wikimedia Foundation, John Abbe at Wagn, and all the other wiki community folks who worked together to get this off the ground!

Other posts around the web:

• Marshall Kaplan: Wiki Providers Come Together to Offer Universal Edit Button
• Rick Turoczy: Getting wiki with it: Wiki types (AboutUs included) collaborate on universal wiki edit button
• Wikimedia Foundation: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2008/06/19/firefox-3-and-the-wiki-edit-button/
• John Abbe: Universal Edit Button
• Martin Cleaver: Wiki this site: The Universal Edit Button launches today

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When I co-founded Socialtext over five years ago, the insight was that tools emerging on the consumer web had better social dynamics than enterprise software, were a fun way to get things done and could be adapted to the context of an organization.  I'm proud to finally see our partnership with Dan Bricklin come to fruition (see his post, and the history of the project) -- and the result is something truly new and solves real distributed multi-group collaboration problems.

Many at the conference told me SocialCalc was the best thing they saw, one said finally, a real Enterprise 2.0 application.  I'm not afraid of overstating the difference and potential of SocialCalc:

• Most people play email volleyball with Excel attachments, spreadsheet hell, where its hard to work off of the latest version and error rates are as high as 90%.  Recently, web spreadsheets have turned it into tetherball, but they largely are reimplementing a single worksheet on a single webpage.
• Enterprise work involves numbers, and the conversations around numbers support key decisions, assumptions and model
• The combination of a robust wiki and spreadsheet not only enables this conversation, but all the things you love about wikis and define Enterprise 2.0:
  • Search
  • Linking
  • Authoring
  • Tagging
  • Extensions
  • Signals
• Spreadsheets are not just about numbers, is the most popular tool for
  
  • lists,
  • tables,
  • two-dimensional layout,
  • databases,
  • scratchpad applications,
  • working around the structure of enterprise software, and
  • working with structured information in an unstructured way.
• Enterprise work is distributed, multi-group, often asynchronous and with varying permissions.  Working with SocialCalc across multiple spreadsheets, multiple pages and multiple workspaces supports distributed work. 
• The deep integration and integrated user experience of SocialCalc and our Business Social Software platform creates capabilities even web spreadsheet plugins for wikis can't match.
• Distributed collaboration is essential for core use cases such as project management, planning, budgeting, forecasting, reporting and more.  But in particular, it supports Socialtext's four core solution areas.

To put it another way:

I need to point out what SocialCalc should never be, function equivalent to Excel.  Today it supports the ODF small group of functions.  David Greenfield and Rafe Needleman see this as a weakness or a long way to go, but as Dennis Howlett points out, its a strength and we've come a long way because the approach is different.  We would rather support 80% of calculation needs and focus on social software properties that give it a 10x benefit for distributed work.

For some it may be the simple availability of secure onsite deployment, given enterprise policies or the uncertainty of datamining in someone else's cloud.  While the latter doesn't present as great a risk, the former is not changing as fast as you think.

In my last post, wrapping up the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, I made the argument that Enterprise 2.0 is just scratching the surface of process-specific solutions that are in-the-flow of daily work.  SocialCalc lets people work with people and structured data in an unstructured way and is a real proof point for the potential of Enterprise 2.0.  If you are interested in a demo or our private beta, contact us.

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Interesting times at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston this week.  The conference has become the core of our little but growing industry.  Recall if you will that it started as the Collaborative Technologies Conference in 2005, when organizer Jen Pahlka noted in the kickoff:

Interop is the genesis of this conference, even the first shows had a collaboration thread.  But most of Interop focuses on IT.  Business side of collaboration is the harder problem to solve, the focus of this event and one of the goals is to credentialize the concept of collaboration.

Shortly after, collaboration emerged as a strategic imperative for enterprises.  And the state of the art for solving line of business collaboration continues to evolve.

E2Open

In stark contrast to the vendor sports and paid speaking slots was Enterprise2Open.  Two people tried to hold sessions pitching their companies, and the law of two feet worked against them.  There were solid conversations on adoption, use cases, business cases and edge cases like gaming.  It provided a pressure relief valve for the structure of the commercial event, enabling Booz Allen Hamilton and BearingPoint to share their implementation stories that didn't get on the program for example. About half of the attendees has been at a Barcamp before, some came only for this free portion of the event and while there were self-organized hiccups, participants valued the experience. 

Adoption and Markets

A common thread for customers, facilitators and vendors was on adoption and culture.  There were a lot of IT managers in attendance sharing the failures of their utility deployments.  One open space session spent most of the time listing barriers to adoption.

AIIM research presented the results of their adoption survey in the keynote before mine.  Among their findings was age doesn't matter (Boomers vs. Milennials), some early IT adopters are frustrated and those who adopted KM were more inclined towards Enterprise 2.0.  Other analyst firms (Gartner, Forrester) have psychodemogaphic profiles of organizations that can aid vendors in identifying earlier targets. 

But as I remarked in my keynote, if we limit the market to the KM-inclined, we will go the way of KM.  I believe there are several issues here:

• Early IT Adoption frustration comes from IT-driven deployments.  Previous bottom up demand from PCs, Spreadsheets, LANs, email and instant messaging was met by rolling it out as a utility.  But unlike email or IM, this isn't a communication tool, collaboration requires engagement with the line of business.  IT is good at the engagement required for process modeling and hard coding structured workflows.   But the unstructured and collaborative nature of these tools requires line of business leadership, partnership with IT and applying best practices that are deeper than patterns.  Simply opening up a wiki utility for people to consume results in a 1,000 dead wikis.
• Generations may not matter, but they are different.  While there is no doubt about the social software proclivity of NetGens, and their demand for working this way, a more blended solution needs to address all generations.
• Some of the best implementations are happening where they shouldn't.  One of our favorite customers has a self-described command-and-control culture.  The best sessions at the Enterprise 2.0 conference were the case studies of cultures where people get "slapped down" for sharing (the CIA Intellipedia), highly regulated (Wacovia) and security-conscious (Lockheed-Martin).

Flow and Solutions

In my talk I noted the evolution of Enterprise 2.0 use cases:

• 2002: techies for project communication
• 2004: business user alternative to email
• 2006: internal Wikipedia
• 2008: process-specific solutions

The Wikipedia-inside use case is representative of most Enterprise 2.0 implementations today, not just wikis, what Michael Idinopolus calls above-the-flow:

• In-the-Flow wikis enable people do their day-to-day work in the wiki itself. These wikis are typically replacing email, virtual team rooms, and project management systems.

• Above-the-Flow wikis invite users to step out of the daily flow of work and reflect, codify, and share something about what they do. These wikis are typically replacing knowledge management systems (or creating knowledge management systems for the first time).

Above-the-flow generally has a softer ROI, involves what can be at least perceived as a side activity and different and more difficult adoption characteristics.  Adoption is closer to community building, but in the context where many forces want to work against the community.  When it does succeed, and with the right practices it does, the benefits are worthwhile.  But I believe that above-the-flow is less than half the opportunity for employees, partners and customers.

This is where in-the-flow solutions come in.  They speak to real business problems, can be repeatably implemented and adopted with the right practices, have harder ROI and are process-specific.  Making them work requires coaching and management consulting services that are rare today.

Through in-the-flow and above-the-flow solutions, use of Enterprise 2.0 tools and practices will be as common for knowledge workers in ten years as the PC is today.  In 2.018, feel free to fact check me on this.

Process and Practice

Clay Shirky said business process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity.    Traditional enterprise software serves the goal of automating business process to drive down cost. I've held for some time that your average knowledge worker spends most of their time handling exceptions to process not executing it and augmenting those activities is an opportunity for social software. 

Mike Gotta chatted some golden nuggets during my talk that process is the way work should be done - work practices are how work is done (localized to a given situational context ... Some processes need work practices to be precise, other processes have more elasticity ... the more elastic a process is, the greater the opportunity to apply participatory applications.

And he is right, especially about work practices, except we have to consider:

• Most processes are out of date almost as soon as they are defined because of changes to the environment
• Many processes are defined in ways that current executors can't understand and nobody knows who authored them
• Many more processes are barely written down

Broadly, software that supports work practices, implemented with best practices, enables better decisions, faster cycle and resolution times and adaptivity.  I no longer believe we are headed towards an end of process (although that was a stimulating conversation).  Because of social software, I do believe that we will  redesign most processes with more transparency and participation -- and work practices will finally have context-aware tools that augment them and best practices will gain continual improvement through execution itself.

This post is too long

I was going to conclude with how SocialCalc relates to all this, but that's for the next post.  Here you can find my presentation at the conference.

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Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, Socialtext has made another major product announcement: SocialCalc, the first truly wiki-integrated spreadsheet.

SocialCalc has one really big, really obvious benefit over traditional spreadsheets like Excel: it's distributed. In other words, more than one person can work on it at a time. But as ZDNet's David Greenfield and others have pointed out, we're not the first ones to have delivered distributed spreadsheeting.

What's different about SocialCalc--and I think it's really fundamental--is that SocialCalc is integrated into a wiki. You can drop a spreadsheet into a wiki page. You can drop wiki text into a spreadsheet. You can link from a spreadsheet to a wiki page that explains where the numbers came from. In short, you can talk about the numbers.

What a concept...talk about the numbers. If you've done a lot of modeling, you know that the hard part isn't the mechanics of the model; it's the reasonableness and consistency of the assumptions, the accuracy of the inputs, and the strength of the modeling logic. And for all of those things, you need to talk: to your teammates, your colleagues, your data providers, your analysts, etc. A spreadsheet is rarely a one-person affair. Even if one person builds the spreadsheet, the data and thinking that goes into it almost always comes from a broader team of contributors. If those contributors aren't talking about what they're doing, it's just garbage going in. And we all know what garbage in leads to. Talking is also the single best way to spot the spreadsheet errors that Dennis Howlett has so artfully documented.

Our traditional analytical tools--whether Visicalc, Lotus 1-2-3, Excel, or even Google spreadsheets--have done a great job enabling us to crunch the numbers. But they've made it really really hard to talk about the numbers we were crunching. There's no good way in Excel to explain where the figure in Cell I-57 came from. There's no good way to ask whether the growth projection in Y-163 feels reasonable to the rest of the team.

Those of us who have done a lot of modeling come up with our own workarounds. We flag assumptions in a special color. We make cryptic annotations on those little yellow stickies you can add to cells. But those workarounds don't really shed much light. They may serve as useful personal reminders to the model-builder, but they don't usually do much for the rest of the team. If you really want to understand my model, let's face it: I have to walk you through it. If I'm a good and careful modeler, the process is painful and time-consuming. If I'm a sloppy modeler, well...let's not think about that scenario.

SocialCalc enables teams to have conversations about the models they are building. If I want to explain where I got the number in I-57, I can write it in a wiki page. A teammate can question my logic on that same page. If the teammate owns that input, she can change the number, and she can explain her reasoning so I understand it.

Realizing these benefits will, of course, require some new spreadsheet hygene. Modelers will have to start explaining the assumptions behind their models (gasp!). Teammates will have to pay attention to those explanations (double-gasp!). In short, teams will have to start talking about the numbers. With SocialCalc, they finally have a good way to do it.

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SOCIALTEXT UNVEILS SOCIALCALC, THE FIRST SOCIAL SPREADSHEET

Wiki Pioneer Socialtext Incorporates Spreadsheet Application From Dan Bricklin to Create a Distributed Spreadsheet

PALO ALTO, CA - June 10, 2008 - Socialtext, the leading provider of enterprise wiki and social software solutions, today announced SocialCalc(R), a multi-user wiki-based spreadsheet program that simplifies version control, reduces errors and increases productivity. On the heels of its recent announcements -- Socialtext Dashboard and Socialtext People and its four new solutions areas - the SocialCalc announcement underscores the company's vision as the innovator and leader in business social software.

"SocialCalc is the next room in the Business Social Software house we are building on our enterprise wiki foundation," remarks Socialtext CEO Eugene Lee. "This announcement is exciting because that the social spreadsheet effortlessly bridges the generations of the existing workforce and the upcoming workforce and does not require that individuals need to re-learn an existing application."

"The timing of SocialCalc is perfect - we were in need of a wikified spreadsheet that had all of the utility of Google Docs without the datamining," remarks Brandon Stafford, Principal Engineer at GreenMountain Engineering. "The SocialCalc interface is easy for anyone who knows spreadsheets. The automatic revision tracking eliminates the emailing of spreadsheets. That kind of simplification is crucial for our engineering consulting business."

• Socialcalc - through its integrated editing, discussions and current version control the program prohibits errors from centralized aggregation changes because the user always has the correct and current content accessible. Compared to a traditional spreadsheet sent via email, a sheet on a shared drive or document management system, this program can break work into workable increments and provide a closer to synchronous serial process. Individuals can work on their own section(s) and have a roll-up dashboard, an audit trail of changes and simple notification updates.

In 2005, Dan Bricklin, co-creator of the trailblazing VisiCalc spreadsheet program, announced that he had started working on an Open Source spreadsheet that "combines some of the ease of authoring and multi-person edit ability of a wiki with the familiar formatting and data organizing metaphor of a spreadsheet." Socialtext co-founder Ross Mayfield wanted to evolve another Personal Computing application into Social Software. In 2006 they announced an agreement for Bricklin to finish his initial standalone server-based product, which was released in 2007 as SocialCalc. Using what was learned in this product, Bricklin embarked on a complete redeployment of just the editing and calculation part of SocialCalc in a much more polished and robust, client-based Ajax implementation. Socialtext engineers have worked with Bricklin to integrate this new spreadsheet "engine" into the Business Social Software platform -- giving it the benefits of sharing, tagging, version control, and enterprise-level security and permissioning.

"Traditionally, wikis have centered on paragraphs of text and have proven invaluable for dealing with information in that form," said Dan Bricklin. "I am thrilled at how we have been able to bring spreadsheet editing into the wiki environment. Business people get the familiar layout, formatting, and calculation functionality of a spreadsheet together with the organic multi-page building and sharing functionality of a wiki. The spreadsheet metaphor has proven to be one of the most popular ways to organize, analyze, and store a vast range of types of information. With the addition of SocialCalc, Socialtext now has an even more powerful tool to let groups develop and keep track of their important data and ideas."

The SocialCalc spreadsheet engine is also a project on the One Laptop per Child Program, a non-profit directive to empower children of developing countries to learn by providing one connected laptop to every school-age child.

SocialCalc is currently in private Beta on the Business Social Sofware platform with Socialtext customers and will be commercially available within 90 days. To learn about the Beta program or get a demonstration, contact Socialtext sales. Further information is available on the press wiki www.socialtext.net/st-press/

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On June 17th at the Stanford Business School I'm moderating the MIT-Stanford Venture Lab event Cloud Computing: Creating Value for Web 2.0 Apps.

Moderator
Ross Mayfield, Chairman, President and Co-founder, Socialtext

Speaker
Jonathan Bryce, Co-founder, Mosso, a Rackspace's company

Panelists
Paul McNamara, CEO, Coghead
Ping Li, Partner, Accel Partners
Michael Crandell, CEO & Founder, RightScale
Lydia Leong, Research Director, Gartner

Cloud computing increases capacity and expands computing capabilities without heavy investment in infrastructure, training or software licensing. Most importantly though, it democratizes Web 2.0 application development. With the removal of two significant barriers to entry - cost and capacity access - suddenly, even small, lesser-funded entrepreneurs can dream big and bring their grand Web 2.0 applications to market.

What are the ramifications of democratization? How are entrepreneurs exploiting cloud computing and leveraging Web 2.0? What challenges do these entrepreneurs face? Are they making money? What are the hot areas of development today and what will the next areas be? Will offerings from these new, small, nimble, creative thinking entrepreneurs change the Web 2.0 user experience? Will cloud computing live up to expectations?

And I always thought these infrastructure guys were below me, stack wise, apparently with this cloud thing we should all look up.  For background, I suggest Nick Carr's blog and book.  Sign up here, and the Facebook event is here.

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