When Graymont Limited went looking for a tool to help it “transcend the continent” and get far-flung employees working together as if they were just around the corner from each other, they turned to the enterprise 2.0 technology in ThoughtFarmer. 

As one of North America’s largest producers of lime, the essentials of Graymont’s business haven’t changed in 100 years. They operate facilities on sites that have been in operation for 200 years. But the company’s philosophy around information and technology is absolutely 21st century.

“We believe that sharing information everywhere possible will help us do a better job and be a lower-cost producer,” says director of IT Ron Ogilvy. And part of that philosophy is that every employee be included in the collaborative environment, especially those who come to work in steel-toed boots and only occasionally sit at a computer.

Graymont planned to implement a company intranet as a binding element in its seven-year strategy to build a common set of information tools for over 1000 employees in several dozen locations across the continent. Ogilvy briefly considered Microsoft SharePoint for this crucial role. “But we came quickly to the conclusion that to do what we wanted in SharePoint, it would be a very large, expensive and long project.”

Last year, he trialed several “intranet in a box” products – plus ThoughtFarmer. ThoughtFarmer won hands down. “Its ease of use and the look and feel were huge attractions. We were amazed how quickly we could set up a complete and very effective tool,” Ogilvy says.

 
Screenshot of Graymont’s ThoughtFarmer-powered intranet home page

Today, three months after launch, myGraymont, the company’s ThoughtFarmer-based intranet, is the portal to most of the applications, tools and information resources employees use, including the Web-based JD Edwards EnterpriseOne ERP system. It’s also the primary interface to the company directory. Employees are responsible for keeping their own listings up to date on their personal myGraymont pages, which they’re encouraged to personalize with pictures and information about themselves.

And ThoughtFarmer is the company’s document management system too, its database already populated with thousands of items – policies, instructions, how-tos. Employees can edit and correct most and post their own. “So you have a continuously evolving, self-healing base of information,” Ogilvy says.

 
Screenshot of ThoughtFarmer page for the Pilot Peak quarry

The payback? Easier access to information and tools will make employees more productive – and less frustrated – and also reduce the management burden for IT. “But the big values,” Ogilvy says, “will come in areas outside IT – when a person in Pennsylvania, say, connects with someone in Alberta and shows him something he’s done that saves the company $10,000 or $20,000; or when an informal discussion group is established amongst maintenance workers or kiln operators across borders and geography. We expect those things will happen regularly.” 

Just using myGraymont to interact more personally with distant colleagues can be an end in itself, he adds. “If it helps create a new relationship, the value of that relationship will be the payback.”

A photo gallery of a lime plant from Graymont’s ThoughtFarmer installation.

Are wikis social software? Take a look at a typical Wikipedia page. There’s nothing social about it. It’s collaborative, sure. But it’s not social.

As we’ve written before, we believe that content is so much more meaningful when it’s put in a social context. That’s why every wiki page in ThoughtFarmer clearly indicates:

• Who created it
• Who edited it
• Who commented on it

Clicking on any of these names shows you:

• A rich profile of who the person is [screenshot]
• What else they’ve been creating [screenshot]
• A link to follow them via RSS

In the upcoming years, I think we’ll see more and more wikis make small changes to become more social. In the meantime, I’m glad ThoughtFarmer has a head start.

Hat tip to Jevon MacDonald, who got me thinking about this in his post “Wikis are not Social Software“.

When IDEO needed something better than a wiki for internal collaboration, they turned to ThoughtFarmer.

IDEO is the company that designed the Swiffer Sweeper for Procter & Gamble, the Palm V personal digital assistant for 3Com, and the first mouse for Apple. They devised the “Keep the Change” account service for Bank of America, the Windows Home Computing concept for Microsoft, and the Coasting Bicycle design strategy for Shimano.

Recently, IDEO embarked on a new project to empower their internal communities to create and manage their own online collaborative spaces. With more than 500 employees in eight offices around the world, they sought better ways to share knowledge and collaborate across physical distances.

“We knew that wikis promised much of what we were after,” says Gentry Underwood, project lead for the initiative. “But most of the tools on the market are too difficult to use. We wanted something intuitive and straightforward, that our communities could pick up and start using without training.”

Gentry’s team tested more than 20 systems in search of one that would be both simple and powerful enough to provide their community with basic online collaboration and communication abilities. In the end, they chose ThoughtFarmer.

Today, IDEO’s ThoughtFarmer installation is an eclectic mix of ideas, conversations, reference documents and project materials. The content is fluid and constantly changing: every day edits are made as pages evolve, new discussions emerge and new files are uploaded.

“Our ThoughtFarmer system has been a big success within the organization,” says Gentry. “After only six months, we’re seeing literally hundreds of times more activity than any other wiki-like tool we’ve ever used. It’s already become an integral piece of our intranet.”

(This is an excerpt from a presentation I did this week to an industry analyst. She wanted our “elevator pitch”, and I decided the simplest way to describe ThoughtFarmer was to compare it with SharePoint, which most of our customers also consider before deciding on us.)

ThoughtFarmer is a simple, social SharePoint.

It’s a SharePoint that people can actually figure out how to use.

And it’s one that puts the social network front-and-center – so everything in the system revolves around people, which makes it so much more useful and interesting.

Virtually every knowledge company with more than 100 employees has an intranet – a place where you can find company news, find a phone number, download a form… but these intranets are suffering with the appearance of department-level wikis and blogs. So the intranet team is saying, “Hey, we still need an intranet, a company portal – but we’re ready to learn from these wikis and blogs. We’re ready to open up the authoring to everyone, and we want to make it social.”

So they’re considering SharePoint for this. Every single one of our customers also considered SharePoint. Intrawest considered SharePoint. But they went with us because ThoughtFarmer is simple, and it’s social.

And almost every one of our customers also uses wiki software and blog software. NESTA (National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts) in London – they also use wiki software and blogging software. But they still need to tie it all together into a single destination that’s set as every employee’s home page – and that’s ThoughtFarmer.

I said it’s a simple SharePoint. How is it simple?

We’ve removed every possible barrier to content contribution:

• Add a page in 2 clicks
• Navigation is automatically built for you
• The new page is listed on the home page as a recent change, by you
• Add a comment in a click. The author is alerted by email or RSS
• Add micro-content – Favouriting or rating a page influences search results and improves system quality
• Add content by email – just send any email to ThoughtFarmer, and it matches the from address with your personal spot on ThoughtFarmer and creates the page

And from an admin perspective, ThoughtFarmer is ready to go out-of-the-box. Ask eHarmony. They had ThoughtFarmer up and running as their intranet platform, all content migrated, all employees trained, in 5 days.

I said it’s a social SharePoint. How is it social?

Absolutely every piece of content is clearly tied to a user. When you add a page, it’s linked to you. If I click your name, I see your profile and all the other content you’ve created. I can browse your social network in the visual relationship browser.

When content is put in a social context, it’s so much more meaningful.

Simple vs. Complex.

Social vs. Machine.

I think ThoughtFarmer’s an easy choice (but I’m biased).

Relationships are funny things. A combination of formal and informal roles, responsibilities, and feelings, they’ve given the designers and users of social software a hard time. How do we make explicit something as subtle as friendship? How often does “friend” just not seem at all like the right term to be using in Facebook to describe an acquaintance? The result is often not very pretty.

In a business setting, enterprise 2.0 tools have a slightly easier time of things. Relationships can be formally codified within an organization. He’s my direct report. She’s my boss. That’s my department. This is my project team. These are relationships that, while they may change, don’t vary or depend on my day to day emotional state and how I feel about them (wish as you may).

So we’ve been thinking, wouldn’t it be useful to utilize those relationships to tune your notifications from the intranet?

Keeping abreast of what’s happening in your organization through monitoring the activity of your intranet is something that we’ve been working on in the design of ThoughtFarmer for a while. The current incarnation is fairly basic: we have a simple filter of recent changes on the home page that shows who’s updated their status (People), what pages have been edited (Pages), and what comments have been made (Comments). It’s enough to provide you with some signals that stuff is happening and you may or may not be interested in that stuff.

What we’re working towards in an upcoming release of ThoughtFarmer is a model that provides somewhat more fine-grained control of what’s happening. Our current model, if there’s lots of people in your organization, is a bit coarse: seemingly random noise from the knowledge repository of your company. To help us refine that concept, we’ve sought inspiration from the real world and the pioneering work of American anthropologist Edward T. Hall, to introduce a concept of proxemics to the intranet.

Proxemics was Hall’s contribution to the study of how people relate to each other interpersonally and socially through their physical proximity to each other. Hall identified four expanding zones of relation: intimate distance, personal distance, social distance, and public distance. Each of these distances represented boundaries of physical space from centimeters (intimate) to tens of meters away (public) and represented the ability to engage in certain relationship-defining acts between people across those distances.

These then represent a nice lens through which we can look at the relationships we have with each other, our company, and our content on the intranet. Intimate distance represents information all about you: your page edits, your comments, your status, etc. Personal distance represents stuff that’s been done to you or your content by others. Social distance is everything within your network, including your management relationships and group / division / regional relationships. Finally, public distance on the intranet is everyone and their activity in the organization.

Individuals, groups, their activity, and their content have a gravity to each user. Like Grover from Sesame Street, some are near, others are far. We acknowledge this model doesn’t take into account the interpersonal ties and informal social bonds that exist throughout an organization, but hope that intranet proxemics will help provide a subtle and useful mechanism for keeping aware of what’s going on within the organization.

Prior to a company-wide deployment of a new wiki intranet, many companies conduct a pilot to an initial group of users. Here are a few suggestions on making that pilot a success.

1. Choose the right group

Size: Don’t make your pilot too big, or it will become as big a job as launching to the whole company. But don’t make it too small, either: You need enough people adding content to make it interesting. 20 to 50 people is probably good.

Attitude: Choose keeners — people who aren’t afraid to try new things or to use new technology. Choose people that will be enthusiastic about the potential for open collaboration at your company.

Seniority: Try to get one or more people from the senior team to actively participate in the pilot. If they set the example, the rest of the pilot group will be more likely to actively participate and view the pilot as important.

2. Set up a basic information structure

Blank slate = bad. No one knows what to do with a blank wiki. So set yours up with a basic navigation structure.

Sample top-level navigation structure:

• People (or Staff Directory)
• Locations
• Projects
• Departments
• Tools & Links

You might also try building out the information structure underneath some of the top-level items:

Departments

• Finance
• HR
• IT
• R&D
• Sales & Marketing

Caution: Be careful not to be too granular in the way you define the initial information structure, or your wiki might seem too restrictive. It’s easy to move pages if you need to subdivide or rearrange sections in the future.

3. Populate some initial content

Users learn by example. If users see lots of examples of how others have populated content, they find it easy to imitate. Wikis are generally easy to use — as long as users see that something is possible, they can usually figure out how to do it on their own.

Users. User profiles are a central part of any intranet. Populate them with an initial import from your directory system, importing as much data as you have available.

Barnraising. You can populate a whack of content in a single day. Try getting 4 or 5 people together for an all-day barnraising.

Give users a reason to return. In the early stages of the pilot, make sure there’s something new on the home page every single day. News items, polls or the cafeteria lunch menu work well for this.

4. Set up email notifications

Email notifications: Many wiki systems can send you an email when someone responds to your comment or edits a page you’ve created. Make sure these notifications are enabled — they keep online conversations flowing and drive repeat traffic to the wiki.

Alternatively, you can rely on RSS feeds for these notifications. But RSS may still be poorly used or understood by many people in your pilot group.

5. Assign tasks to pilot group

Give your pilot group something specific to accomplish with your wiki. Ideas:

1. Add a photo of yourself and detailed background information to your profile
2. Use the wiki to share the agenda of your next meeting
3. Forward a valuable email thread to the wiki (if it supports automatic page creation from emails)

6. Promote, launch and follow up

Promote. Prior to the pilot, send several email communications to your pilot group to get them excited about participating.

Launch. Have an event to launch the pilot. If you’re in a single office, reserve a boardroom, do a short demo, assign tasks, and eat some doughnuts. If you’re in several offices, launch via a web conference.

Follow up. Schedule group or individual follow-up meetings for the week following the pilot launch. See how users are doing with their tasks, and answer their questions. A weekly or biweekly group meeting to review progress will help keep things moving along.

Other resources

WikiPatterns is full of great suggestions on helping a wiki succeed in a corporate environment.

Last week we considered ThoughtFarmer vs. SLATES. What about ThoughtFarmer vs. FLATNESSES, Dion Hinchcliffe’s new updated acronym for Enterprise 2.0?

I realized the shortcomings of SLATES after reading this blog post by Jed Cawthorne. He compared old-school ECMs with SLATES and scored them 5.5 out of 6. That’s 92%! For Web 1.0 technology! So what’s missing from SLATES?

Hinchcliffe adds 4 new things to his acronym:

• Freeform
• Network-oriented
• Social
• Emergence

How does ThoughtFarmer stack up to this “more refined conception of Enterprise 2.0″?

Freeform

ThoughtFarmer starts as a blank slate for every customer, and then begins a rapid — and freeform — evolution. Our clients use it as a:

• Wiki
• Corporate intranet
• Extranet
• Project management system
• Document management system
• Link aggregator
• Combination of the above

As a democratic, group-maintained platform, ThoughtFarmer becomes whatever its users want it to be.

Network-oriented

“[Application content must] be fully Web-oriented, addressable, and reusable.”

ThoughtFarmer content is fully web-oriented and addressable. On “reusable”, though, we still have work to do.

Our 2.5 release, due in January, greatly expands RSS generation to almost every nook and cranny. To achieve a perfect score on reusability, though, we’ll have to expose our internal API to other applications. This is a priority for us in 2008.

Social

The social networking aspects of ThoughtFarmer are stronger than any other enterprise wiki solution. These include:

• Visual relationship browser
• Personal status updates (Facebook-style)
• Auto-generated links between people and content
• User “Favourites”
• Recent changes by person

Emergence

Emergence means that something complex arises out of relatively simple interactions. A document is the emergent product of a wiki; an answer is the emergent product of a prediction market.

A good ThoughtFarmer example is the Installation Guide on our support site. Seven of our team members have added, edited, and revised the document over many months in response to new versions and new issues. Each change is minor, but the emergent product is a detailed set of instructions. Yes, ThoughtFarmer has emergence.

~~~

FLATNESSES may not roll off the tongue, but it captures the components of Enterprise 2.0 more completely than SLATES.

These comparisons have been a useful exercise for me, and I’m pleased that by either the SLATES or FLATNESSES yardstick, ThoughtFarmer is genuinely Enterprise 2.0.

In his seminal article on Enterprise 2.0, professor Andrew McAfee lays out the six components of next-generation enterprise collaboration platforms:

S - Search
L - Links
A - Authoring
T - Tags
E - Extensions
S - Signals

How does ThoughtFarmer stack up?

Search

“Users are increasingly bypassing [navigation] in favor of keyword searches.”

ThoughtFarmer has a fast, accurate, configurable search engine.

Links

“Links are an excellent guide to what’s important… Many people have to be given the ability to build links.”

All ThoughtFarmer users can easily embed links in text, or even create directories of links.

Authoring

“When authoring tools are deployed… the intranet shifts from being the creation of a few to being the constantly updated, interlinked work of many.”

All ThoughtFarmer users can create and edit content with a few clicks.

Tags

“[Folksonomies] reflect the information structures and relationships that people actually use, instead of the ones that were planned for them in advance.”

All ThoughtFarmer users can apply tags to pages and documents.

Extensions

“Moderately ’smart’ computers take tagging one step further by automating some of the work of categorization and pattern matching.”

ThoughtFarmer tagging enables faceted browsing — quickly mine through lists of thousands of pages by progressively applying tags.

Signals

“The final element of the SLATES infrastructure is technology to signal users when new content of interest appears.”

ThoughtFarmer alerts you to new content via RSS or email notifications.

ThoughtFarmer is 100% SLATES-compliant.

But is it FLATNESSES-compliant? I’ll address this in a future blog post.

Jevon MacDonald’s article “Dead Paradigms in Applications” trashed on patterns used by “lazy developers”, like the Save Button (”What should a user have to Save that you shouldn’t have already saved for them?”) and the File (”Creating a file… is dead dead dead. I create content.”).

His article reminded me of the radical new GUI, “SUGAR”, designed by the One Laptop Per Child project. Instead of software applications, SUGAR has “Activities”. Instead of folders and files, SUGAR has a “Journal”.

Screenshot of SUGAR’s Journal concept

SUGAR is great. And Jevon raises good points. But patterns (like the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library, for example) allow designers to accept many things as conventions, as foundational elements, and focus their efforts on the parts of the application that make it unique. Patterns can be great, even when they’re old.

So what’s a pragmatic approach for ThoughtFarmer?

1. No more save buttons. Jevon’s right, we should auto-save everything.
2. No more folders. We have tags and search. We should continue to stay away from folders.
3. More visualizations. Social networks are best presented visually. Moritz Stefaner’s Relationship Browser has been working great for us — we should capitalize on this new navigational paradigm.
   
   ThoughtFarmer’s Relationship Browser
4. Embrace the Journal. SUGAR’s Journal makes sense. It should be the pattern for our improved Recent Changes feature.
   
   Recent Changes portlet for ThoughtFarmer 2.5

We’re not quite ready to get rid of Projects, Permissions, Pages and Configurations, all of which Jevon calls “dead”. But he forced us to challenge some of our assumptions, and that’s always a good thing.

Hosted software, cloud computing, SaaS. They get so much press you’d think that no one installs software on their private network anymore.

The reality, of course, is that behind-the-firewall software is a much, much larger portion of the market than SaaS — maybe 1000 times larger. It’s just not growing as fast.

ThoughtFarmer, as a web 2.0 wiki social software solution, is contrarian. Unlike most solutions in this space, we install behind the firewall. Why? Four reasons:

Speed. Applications on your network travel at full throttle. They’re not affected by internet congestion. And because they’re dedicated to you, they’re not affected by what the vendor’s other customers are doing.

Stability. When the software is on your servers, you don’t have to upgrade if you don’t want to. And there are never any surprise changes.

Security. Do you trust some 23-year-old in Palo Alto with your data? Me neither. I mean, he can have my email address and Flickr photos, but not my trade secrets. Behind the firewall is the safest place for your intellectual capital to live.

Single Sign-On. Software on your private network can integrate with your Windows log on. You get a secure, personalized view without ever entering a password.

(Hmm… they all start with an S.)

The main disadvantage? Software behind the firewall is usually more expensive. It takes more manpower to maintain the servers and to install and upgrade the application. But for most companies with more than a few dozen employees, the peace of mind is worth it.