ThoughtFarmer Featured in McAfee’s Enterprise 2.0 Book

Gord| November 19th, 2009 1 Comment »

For those of you who missed it, Andrew McAfee’s Enterprise 2.0 book launched recently. Now Andrew can say he not only coined the phrase, but he wrote the book on Enterprise 2.0 too. Formerly at Harvard, Andrew works at the Center for Digital Business at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He blogs regularly on Enterprise 2.0 topics, asks lots of questions on Twitter, and hosts a mean house party to boot.

photo: Andrew McAfee keynoting at Enterprise 2.0 in San Fran, Nov 2009 (Alex Dunne photo)

We were in San Francisco at the Enterprise 2.0 conference when the book launched. Andrew was keynoting at the event and talked about some of the dangers surrounding the continuing adoption of social tools in the enterprise. He had a solid, thought-provoking list of items, wonderfully summed up on Timo’s SAP blog that detailed the keynotes:

Declaring war on the enterprise. As Andrew points out, this is a really bad sales pitch – if the goal is to make the executives go away, they are unlikely to sign up for the plan. Plus, and more importantly, it’s flat-out empirically wrong – there’s still need for some hierarchy, there’s still need for management. To illustrate the point, Andrew pointed to a news story from the satirical journal, the Onion — “Marrxist’s apartment a microscosm of why Marxism doesn’t work”.

Allow walled gardens to flourish. Create mutually inaccessible silos of information. The web works because there’s “a” web, not lots of different webs. He illustrated this with a picture of walled fields from Normandy France.

Accentuate the negative. The risks are manageable, and shouldn’t be ignored, but shouldn’t stop things going forward. For example, one organization implemented a “flag” that could be set to show a potential problem – but so far it’s never been used.

Try to replace email. We’re not going to replace email any time soon. It works well for a lot of people, and in particular, senior decision-makers are happy with it, especially the “one stop shop” aspect of the inbox.

Fall in love with features. Users don’t want more bells and whistles. We have a tendency to cram in more features – but this doesn’t make it any easier to use. The phrase to retain is “what’s the simplest thing that could possibly work?”

Overuse the word “social”. The word is technically accurate, but “I’ve rarely come across a work that has so many negative associations for managers” – it sounds like “technology to organize social hour” (cue picture of Woodstock: chaos, despair, etc.)

For a handful of lucky conference participants, Andy had some copies of the book available. Chris McGrath snagged the last copy on day one of the conference and was pretty darned excited.

And why was Chris excited? Other than the fact that Andrew signed it for him? Well, we’re in the book. Page 134 to be exact. Andrew used the knowledge sharing example from our Intrawest Placemaking Case Study to demonstrate the uniquely valuable benefits of Enterprise 2.0 from an authoring perspective.

You can read the Case Study (and many more stories of wiki success in the enterprise) on the Cases 2.0 site hosted by the fine folks at Socialtext.

Gil Yehuda posted his review of the book which I won’t try to duplicate here. What I will point out is a great passage from Gil’s review:

Let me ask — which is easier: to find information on the Internet using Google or to find information in your corporate intranet? If you say that finding information on the Internet is easier then this book is for you. If you said the opposite, then you are probably lying (and I bet you are a salesman for an intranet search company too). It seems illogical that your intranet (which you pay good money to have) fails to perform nearly as well as the public Internet (which costs you nothing). Enterprise 2.0 by Andrew McAfee explains why corporate information sharing has failed to live up to our expectations – and more importantly what you can do about it. Read this book to learn what companies are doing that fundamentally changes the way they view their information, their intranets, and the teams of people who come to work every day to turn that information into business results.

Now there’s a great challenge for all intranet vendors, ourselves included.

Go grab yourself a copy of Enterprise 2.0 on Amazon, Chapters, or your local bookstore. It’s a great read.

ThoughtFarmer at Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco

Chris| November 2nd, 2009 Comments Off

Gord and I are in San Francisco this week at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. We’re wandering the halls in our ThoughtFarmer t-shirts, attending sessions, meeting existing customers and speaking with potential new ones.

A handsome and slimming ThoughtFarmer t-shirt

Bevin Hernandez, the project manager who led the hugely successful ThoughtFarmer roll-out at Penn State University Outreach, is presenting on how to launch Enterprise 2.0 in Oliver Mark’s and Sameer Patel’s session on Selling the Case for Accelerating Business Performance with Enterprise Collaboration and 2.0 Technologies.

A marketing piece that was part of Penn State’s intranet launch

Gentry Underwood, who leads IDEO’s Knowledge Sharing discipline, is leading a session on the Best of Boston track entitled “How to Build Collaborative Software That People Will Actually Use“. ThoughtFarmer is a critical component of IDEO’s intranet.

Gentry presenting IDEO’s knowledge sharing platform at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco. Photo by Paul May.

We’d love to meet with you too. Contact us via twitter at @thoughtfarmer (that’s me) or @gordonr (that’s Gord) and let’s set something up.

Intranet Journal Reviews ThoughtFarmer 3.5

Chris| August 18th, 2009 Comments Off

Troy Dreier at Intranet Journal reviewed ThoughtFarmer 3.5 with a positive write-up entitled, “Harvest Good Ideas with ThoughtFarmer.”

The article takes a look at some of the new features in ThoughtFarmer, calling them “impressive improvements”. It also covers the story of how we worked closely with IDEO to create the new Discussion Capture feature.

Troy also describes several other features in our new version, including the new Employee Directory, tree-view navigation, and performance optimizations via speed enhancements and compression utilities.

I like how Troy summed up ThoughtFarmer, saying it “lets you create a new intranet quickly with an emphasis on social features.”

Read the full article over at Intranet Journal.

Five lessons learned about cross-cultural social networking

Chris| August 5th, 2009 6 Comments »

Social networking theorists like to debate whether and how much cultural differences impact the way people respond to and interact with social networks.*

Some, for example, argue that networks such as Facebook mainly reflect and accommodate values and norms prevalent in Anglo-Saxon cultures (U.S., UK, Canada, etc.) — which explains why they’re much less successful elsewhere.

The theoretical discussion turns starkly practical when multinational enterprises develop intranets or other social networking tools for internal use. Differences are real and sometimes critical, as we learned while helping an Asian-based company with offices in Canada, the U.S., Korea and Japan deploy a global ThoughtFarmer intranet.

ThoughtFarmer goes to Asia: Darren Gibbons, President of OpenRoad/ThoughtFarmer with Joe Vogt and Allie Henze on a trip to South Korea and Japan

The good news is that most such differences can be overcome with a little innovation and modification. Here are five key lessons we learned:

1. Design matters

Asian users said the original ThoughtFarmer pages, designed in Canada, “looked North American.” They enjoyed more muted pastel colors and anime-style emoticons, a look that seemed equally foreign to North American eyes.

This was not a trivial objection. One of the aims of the project was to make this highly distributed and multicultural organization more cohesive. The foreign-ness of the look and feel – on both sides – worked against that.

Solution? More skinning. ThoughtFarmer’s skinning functionality allows web designers to apply CSS designs on a section-by-section basis that suit the preferences of each region.

Compare Mixi, Japan’s #1 social networking site, with Facebook. Mixi uses muted tones and illustration. Facebook uses primary colors and is primarily text-based with photos.

2. Language matters

You may be willing to exercise whatever language skills you have to glean vital information from the Web written in a foreign tongue. But you’re much less likely to struggle with a language barrier for “merely” social communication. And in many cases, you’ll have no skills.

ThoughtFarmer worked around this critical obstacle by incorporating Google Translate APIs. Users can now click a button to get an immediate machine translation of an intranet page, and then flip back and forth between original and translated page. They can also fill in an online form to order a more accurate human translation.

3. Language subtleties matter

We always use professional translators for translating program labels, tags and instructions into a new language. But we’ve found that professional translation on its own isn’t sufficient — only field testing with native speakers can verify accuracy. And minor mis-translations can have disproportionate effects.

For example, when ThoughtFarmer translated the program to Korean, it used a literal equivalent of the term “favorites”. But Koreans and Japanese use the term ‘scrap’ or ‘scrapping’ when they bookmark a web page – not a translation but the English words. ‘Favorites’ meant little or nothing to them. Result: many didn’t realize the feature was available so didn’t use it.

4. Performance matters

It’s not so much a cultural as a market difference, but norms for Internet connectivity vary around the world. Koreans, for example, enjoy very fast Internet connections – 10 Mbps and up. With the intranet initially hosted in Canada, Korean users complained that response times were slow.

The performance shortfall was small, but employees tend not to use tools that fail to perform to their expectations. Action was needed. The solution in this case was to add mirror servers in Korea and a replication scheme to ensure content was always up to date.

Internet speed expectations in Japan and Korea are extremely high: most home users have connections of 10MBps or more. (Photo: Intersection in Tokyo)

5. Faces matter

Sometimes cultural differences are intractable – but that doesn’t mean fatal. For example, Korean and Japanese users were uncomfortable with posting pictures of themselves at their personal intranet pages, preferring to use avatars or pictures of pets. They could not state definite reasons for this preference. Expectations around privacy, perhaps, or a culturally-ingrained sense of personal modesty?

Some North American organizations require employees to post pictures as a way to promote cohesion by making even remote fellow employees seem more familiar and accessible. But the disinclination of the company’s Korean and Japanese employees to do this appeared deep rooted and it was decided not to press the issue. Did it undermine the project as a whole? By no means.

In North America and the UK, most people don’t hesitate to share photos of themselves on their profile. In Asia, it’s more common to use an avatar. Judging from some of the profile photos we see, avatars may be the way to go.

ThoughtFarmer co-founder and president Darren Gibbons, who traveled to Korea last year to observe how the customer’s intranet was being used there, says, “We did find key differences. But there were also lots of things we found where we were on the right track. And people there were quite interested in being involved and definitely understood what we were trying to do.”

Cross-cultural differences do have an impact on the way people use social networking and clearly they must be taken into account in designing tools, but many, possibly most, can be worked around. As for the rest? Vive la difference.

*For a fascinating discussion of perhaps subtler cross-cultural differences than are aired here, see this post and ensuing discussion by Mark Masterson of CSC, Can Social Software Work in Germany?, and this interview with Geert Hostede, author of Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations Across Nations.

ThoughtFarmer in the “Enterprise 2.0 Sweet Spot”: ZDNet

Chris| July 30th, 2009 Comments Off

ZDNet blogger Dion Hinchcliffe released a map of the 2009 Enterprise 2.0 Marketplace in a post yesterday entitled, “Assessing the Enterprise 2.0 marketplace in 2009: Robust and crowded.”

Of over 70 major software products he evaluated for his map, he placed 15 in the “Enterprise 2.0 Sweet Spot” — including ThoughtFarmer.

ThoughtFarmer is in the “Enterprise 2.0 Sweet Spot” of the Map of the 2009 Marketplace

Hinchcliffe defines the Sweet Spot as “social platforms that have figured out how to comply with needs of enterprises in terms of governance, security, single-sign, portal support, standards, etc. while reconciling this successfully with essential Enterprise 2.0 capabilities such as being social, freeform, Web-oriented, and so on.”

The full alphabetical list of Enterprise 2.0 Sweet Spot products is as follows:

1. Atlassian Confluence
2. Acquia Drupal
3. ConnectBeam Spotlight
4. Grovesite
5. Jive Social Business Software
6. Mindtouch 2009 Enterprise
7. Lotus Connections and Quickr
8. Near-Time
9. Open Text Social Media
10. PBworks
11. SocialText 3.0 Platform
12. Telligent Enterprise
13. Traction Software
14. ThoughtFarmer
15. Twiki 4.x