Toluu : Collaborative Thinking

Collaborative Thinking

Perceptions on collaboration and social software by Mike Gotta

A concise and very effective set of guidelines from David Snowden:

Knowledge can only be volunteered it cannot be conscripted. You can’t make someone share their knowledge, because you can never measure if they have. You can measure information transfer or process compliance, but you can’t determine if a senior partner has truly passed on all their experience or knowledge of a case. We only know what we know when we need to know it. Human knowledge is deeply contextual and requires stimulus for recall. Unlike computers we do not have a list-all function. Small verbal or nonverbal clues can provide those ah-ha moments when a memory or series of memories are suddenly recalled, in context to enable us to act. When we sleep on things we are engaged in a complex organic form of knowledge recall and creation; in contrast a computer would need to be rebooted. In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge. A genuine request for help is not often refused unless there is literally no time or a previous history of distrust. On the other hand ask people to codify all that they know in advance of a contextual enquiry and it will be refused (in practice its impossible anyway). Linking and connecting people is more important than storing their artifacts. Everything is fragmented. We evolved to handle unstructured fragmented fine granularity information objects, not highl

Cisco WebEx Connect QuestionsSeptember 25

Recommendation: People should be examining Cisco's announcements this week more broadly that just a SaaS Collaboration/Web 2.0 play and/or as an update on its UC/video/telepresence efforts. The evolving puzzle pieces will lead to an maturing SaaS, PaaS (Platform as a Service), and Cloud play. Compare/contrast Cisco with those trends in the market.

Predictions:

WebEx Connect will need a strong IdM (Identity Management) play and will do so either through expanding what exists within PostPath or through an acquisition or a deep partnership. This will be a "cloud based" IdM play - not on-premise (to which it would federate with existing solutions). The cloud-based identity service will be key to expand on social networking aspects that will emerge around WebEx Connect.
More acquisitions - perhaps one of the mashup, or PaaS, or feed syndication platform vendors or a mobile player.
More partnerships - perhaps with Jive or other white label/hosted social/community platforms vendors.

Below are a random collection of questions in my head as I sit and listen:

DoJo Questions (Disclaimer: I don't cover Ajax/widgets per se so these questions are based on little knowledge and might be offbase or not relevant)

What is Cisco's position on OpenAjax Alliance?
Where will Cisco go concerning OpenAjax Metadata specification?
Where will Cisco go concerning OpenAjax Hub (secure mashup runtime)?

Cisco Announces Definitive Agreement to Acquire JabberSeptember 19

This is a bold move by Cisco (given it's commitment to SIP) to expand industry thinking around presence as well as expanding its thinking around real-time applications given the type of development capabilities made possible with XMPP.

So suddenly, I see both Avaya and Cisco as the new thought-leaders when it comes to presence (especially in regards to "social presence").

Microsoft and IBM are locked into yesterday's view of presence and where it needs to go.

Question: What will Avaya do since they OEM'd their XMPP capability based on Jabber's platform.

The solution will show up first in the WebEx world (e.g., Media Tone Network, WebEx Connect) and then follow with an on-premise implementation.

Federation will emerge as well between the cloud/SaaS world and on-premise implementations.

Given XMPP's use within the government and financial sectors, this move will also help Cisco expand its customer relationships with those organizations.

(added after original post)

Involvement with the XMPP Standards Foundation will provide Cisco with opportunities to grow the community and partner ecosystem interested in XMPP from both an open source and open standards perspective.

XMPP support will also help interoperability w

More Thoughts On Social PresenceSeptember 14

There were two notable comments to my earlier post (and cross-post) on the concept of social presence and the role (or non-role) of UC vendors.

Blair brings up a direct concern (security) and an indirect concern (surveillance). Both are credible issues. Any social presence platform would clearly need to include a policy management component that would integrate with security and identity management systems within an enterprise to support authentication, authorization and related demands (e.g. logging, audit, archival, and records management). An enterprise would require the capability to impose certain policies on a social presence platform to satisfy governance, risk, compliance or other demands. Additionally, any such system would have to have a permission model with access controls that enable people to manage their own “presence”. But I don’t see this as any more of a roadblock than what we expect from other tools – not just those related to UC but also those related to social software in general (e.g., e-mail, calendar, blog and wiki platforms). So while a valid comment, it applies equally to existing tools almost universally. In fact, I point out the need for such functionality in a recent most on

Microblogging In The EnterpriseSeptember 11

It was inevitable that Twitter-like services would emerge targeting a business audience. While the term “microblogging” is frequently used to describe these platforms, they could also be considered as a derivative of group chat and instant messaging platforms as well. Within the enterprise, it is highly probable that IT organizations will classify these tools as messaging platforms (I would BTW). As a messaging platform, these tools would have to support security, logging, audit and archival functions to satisfy regulatory, compliance and records management demands.

These requirements might “ruin the party” about how people foresee microblogging taking off within the enterprise – but better to plan for such features now, and push vendors to deliver those functions, than ignore some basic blocking-and-tackling issues that inhibited rollout of enterprise instant messaging.

In fact, the other debate that will go on internally within enterprise organizations will be the overlap between microblogging tools and instant messaging tools that support group chat. Will existing instant messaging vendors (i.e., IBM and Microsoft) support Twitter-like capabilities as an extension of their existing UC platforms – or – will there be a sustainable market opportunity for new entrants to deliver such messaging tools to an enterprise audience?

Microsoft acquired Parlano some time ago which could be extended to be a “Twitter for the enterprise”. IBM�