From expanding social networks to building group
memory, social software creates new possibilities for workflow
By Jon Udell
- http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/03/26/13FEsocial_1.html
March 26, 2004
We are social animals
for whom networked software is creating a new kind of habitat. Social software can
be defined as whatever supports our actual human interaction as we colonize the virtual
realm. The category includes familiar things such as groupware and knowledge management,
and extends to the new breed of relationship power tools that have brought the venture
capitalists out of hibernation.
Computer-mediated
communication is the lifeblood of social software. When we use e-mail, instant messaging,
Weblogs, and wikis, were potentially free to interact with anyone, anywhere, anytime.
But theres a trade off. Our social protocols map poorly to TCP/IP. Whether the goal
is to help individuals create and share knowledge or to enrich the relationship networks
that support sales, collaboration, and recruiting, the various kinds of enterprise
social software aim to restore some of the context thats lost when we move
our interaction into the virtual realm.
In networked environments,
everything we do can be monitored. Absent the natural cues that establish social context
its hard to see groups form at the water cooler or hear voices in the hallway through
e-mail or IM social software systems ask us to strike a bargain. If individuals
agree to work transparently, they (and their employers) can know more, do more, and
sell more.
For many people,
the required level of transparency will take some getting used to. Our customers
now include Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Morgan Stanley, and intelligence agencies,
says David Gilmour, CEO of Tacit Knowledge Systems. And they all have come to believe
this technology that watches and compiles for the benefit of the individual is
going to become a permanent backdrop and the dominant paradigm for enterprise software.
What Tacits ActiveNet
watches and compiles are the e-mail messages and documents written by knowledge workers.
Its mission: to ensure that no two people whose document trails reveal a mutual interest
in making a connection fail to miss one another. But its not our job to force you
to work together, Gilmour says. Users content remains private; the ActiveNet connection
broker works only with explicit consent.
Of course, we humans
dont always need to discover new collaborators. Were already members of teams. Within
those teams, there isnt a one-size-fits-all social protocol. Outspoken individuals
author the blogs popping up on corporate intranets. But other team members may prefer
to contribute to a wiki, which is a collaborative space for Web writing. Ross Mayfield
is CEO of Socialtext, a company whose hosted workspaces support both modes. A blog
enables people to express their identity, he says, while a wiki page de-emphasizes
the individual and emphasizes the collective understanding of the group.
The same person may
find both modes useful in different ways. Adam Hertz, VP of technology strategy at
Ofoto, uses Socialtext to coordinate his development team. During a period when he
was traveling a lot, he says he started an internal blog to keep his team updated
on his outside activities. It was helpful, but was unnecessary after he rejoined the
team.
The Social Life
of Content
Whatever the mode
of communication, the primary goal, Hertz says, is to create group memory. Chris Nuzum,
CTO and co-founder of Traction Software (infoworld.com/1054), echoes that theme. Traction
describes its offering as enterprise Weblog software, but Nuzum says that a typical
Traction project is more of a group effort than an individual journal. As such, a
lot of the social interaction that would otherwise occur in e-mail moves into the
comments and discussions attached to the project.
Building group memory
and team awareness has always been the goal of KM (knowledge management), of course.
But most people, Nuzum says, have never had the benefit of mechanized institutional
memory. One reason for this limitation is that KM systems have tended to ask people
to dump knowledge into databases without regard for social incentives, habits, or
consequences. These are central concerns for social software in all its various forms.
Think about how people
behave in a face-to-face meeting. Now consider this report from Ethan Schoonover,
Asian e-business director at Lowe + Draft, about his use of Groove workspaces to manage
meetings online. Its not enough to know that 100 other anonymous intranet users
are logged in, he says. I want to know who is present in the space, who is online
but lingering outside the space, able to be called in by hollering into the hallway,
who is sending nonverbal cues by rummaging through papers.
Group
formation is not only a social process, its often a political one, too. During the
Iraq
war, there was a compelling demonstration of Grooves unique ability to enable groups
to form across political boundaries. Eric Rasmussen, a physician and naval officer,
worked with the
U.S.
governments CENTCOM (Central Command) in
Kuwait
City
,
Basra
, and
Baghdad
, delivering IT support for various humanitarian efforts. In one key information-gathering
operation, he says, We converted the paper form into a Groove form and then asked
the major players (DoD [Department of Defense], State, USAID [United States Agency
for International Development], several UN agencies, NGOs [non-governmental organizations],
Kuwaitis, Saudis, Brits, and U.S. Civil Affairs teams) to download Groove … and
invited them into the space.
The immediate goal
was to coordinate far-forward troops and humanitarian agencies. Rasmussen rates the
outcome a success. Later, he adds, they began to talk to each other, civil to military,
Kuwaiti to Brit, U.S. Army Civil Affairs to U.S. Marine Civil Affairs and those
conversations led to the creation of the
Iraqi
Health
Logistics
Center
.
Selling by Six
Degrees
For Tacits Gilmour,
the hard problem is figuring out who knows what. Given a set of connections among
people, documents, and topics, he says figuring out who knows who is straightforward,
which is why Tacit now wants to add that capability to its product. Websites that
build, visualize, and exploit social networks including Ryze, LinkedIn, Friendster,
Spoke Software, and Orkut have exploded on the scene. Software visualization of
relationship networks has been around for years. It wasnt until recently, though,
that these online services made the technique available to millions of people.
For the average business
user, such services are most helpful when searching for potential employers, employees,
or partners. But relationship maps are of special interest to salespeople, who are
desperate to abolish dreaded the cold call. Recruiting is a perennial hot topic, but
the new killer app for social networking software in the enterprise will deliver relationships
that salespeople can leverage.
There is an instant,
intuitive understanding on the part of the VP of sales that the sales process relies
on these relationship networks, says Antony Brydon, CEO of Visible Path. His companys
software, in limited use but not yet generally available, doesnt read your e-mail
or documents. Its relationship-mining engine does, however, absorb your contacts from
all available sources: CRM/SFA systems, e-mail systems, and desktop contact managers.
Of these sources, CRM and SFA contribute shockingly little to the relationship map;
Brydon pegs the number at about 2 percent. Visible Paths modus operandi is to find
the 98 percent of relationships overlooked by Siebel and SalesForce and make them
accessible from within those applications.
Like other social
networking applications, Visible Path brokers introductions through a chain of anonymous
intermediaries, revealing private information only with consent. The networks scope
is corporate, not global, which Brydon says uniquely qualifies his product as enterprise
software.
Steve Pope, president
of Applied Marketing Services, a consultancy that helps commercial real estate brokers
find business, describes one trial deployment of Visible Path in an office of 22 brokers.
Its an age-old problem, says Pope. Brokers want to guard their connections, but
the decision on a building in
Kansas City
may get made in
Chicago
, and collaboration is whats really going to win the deal. Without robust privacy
assurance it could never happen. But once users see that theyre in control of the
opportunities, and are anonymous in their responses, they warm up to the idea quickly.
If you sit there and let the equipment do its data mining, Pope says, your phone
may ring.
The trial has been
so successful that Pope now envisions broader use of the software. Extended to an
extranet, it could enable real estate brokers and commercial furniture salespeople
to share their complementary relationship networks. For Chris Tolles, VP of marketing
at Spoke Software, the bigger the network, the better. This is a Web-required space,
he says. A large, open network is much more powerful than a small, closed one. According
to Tolles, Spoke takes a dual approach. The company sells an enterprise version of
the application for use behind the firewall. But the internal relationships can be
federated with those arising from activity on the public Spoke network. The union
of private and public profiles is only visible internally, though. Members of the
public Spoke network cant see IBMs firewalled relationship data.
Social protocols
are notoriously tricky to implement in software, and well see lots of experimentation
and tuning as things progress. Consider sales and recruiting, the low-hanging fruit
of enterprise social software. What happens if somebody ignores a request for an introduction
and cuts in on a deal? Along with automated relationship mapping and introductions,
well need to define and enforce what Pope calls rules of engagement. Even in an anonymous
network, everything is ultimately trackable. Thats going to open up a lot of the
dirty little secrets, Pope says, and shine a light in the dark corners of our business.
Can transparency
and privacy coexist? Tacits Gilmour argues by analogy that they can. We have a reasonable
expectation that our phones arent bugged, he says. If our voice mailboxes fill up
and we become unresponsive, though, that becomes an issue that will be noticed and
dealt with. The enterprise has a legitimate interest in finding bottlenecks. Privacy
privileges are constructive when applied to who-knows-what and who-knows-whom, he
says. But we dont think youre entitled to privacy about whether youre available
for interaction.
Are we entering a
brave new world or is cyberspace catching up to the way things work in meatspace?
The answer to both questions is yes.
