Oliver Marks

Current blog post at ZDNet “Conferences as conversation starters”. I’ll resume blogging regularly here once I’ve expanded this site - I’m working on redesign and code offline as time permits.

Book Publishing
Great post from Jay Cross I commented on this morning “Dawn of the un-book”.

A study by the Jenkins Group, a custom book publishing firm, found that:

• One-third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.

• 42 percent of college graduates never read another book after college.

• 80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.

• 70 percent of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the past five years.

• 57 percent of new books are not read to completion.

Increasingly, people hunt and gather what they want to read. Today’s activist readers pluck information from the blogosphere and YouTube and their friends on Facebook and MySpace.

To prosper in times ahead, we need to re-conceptualize our relationship with books, the role of authors and how to make books better.

Jay goes on to argue the case for what used to be called multimedia, something I toiled away on in the late ’90’s, creating Classic Car CD Roms. I wound up self publishing because there was no channel model, and amazingly there still isn’t.

I commented:

- great post. It’s interesting that O’Reilly books have their Safari bookshelf (access to their entire library online) as an option for users. They also publish beta versions of books and then version updates to mirror changes after paper print.

Even this seems a creaky and archaic way of doing things to those of us used to consuming information online.

i use my local library extensively and read at least a book a week. I’m reading ‘Here comes everybody’ by Clay Shirky right now, probably written at least 18 months ago I’d estimate.

Books are great for timeless content - typography, cook books, music theory - that you can have open as you work.

For everything else the book publishing industry seems as out of touch as the music industry at this point in time. (Why does it take months to ‘publish’ a music album you can download?!)

I’ve been negotiating to write articles and books recently, but the lack of publisher urgency to get relevant products in front of potential consumers within a timeframe that’s relevant is astonishingly lacking.

My favorite Email crusader
Luis Suarez of I.B.M, who I blogged about earlier this month and then met up with at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston, has a great piece in the New York Times: “I freed myself from E-mail’s grip” this weekend.

Congratulations Luis for fighting the good fight!

I’ve been focused on blogging on ZD Net the last couple of weeks, having been on the road in Boston for Enterprise 2.0 and then straight back to San Francisco for SuperNova.

I’ll be updating this site over the next few days, and blogging thoughts about the many wonderful connections and conversations I’ve made and had over the last couple of weeks.

Luis Suarez of IBM speaking in Germany at ‘Next 08′ on his experimental progress in eradicating work email. Fortunately Luis’s job at IBM is around exploring this; most of us would be getting a performance review from our bosses if we ignored their endless missives!
Breaking out of the email straightjacket “requires trust from ALL community members…in order for it to work”.

Looking forward to meeting Luis in person in Boston next week….

Scroll halfway down this page to
2:45 p.m. Luis Suarez Rodriguez, Community Builder and Social Computing Evangelist at IBM
Giving up on Work E-mail and hit the video link.

I spent a week without a computer while in New York City in April, using my iphone and borrowed computers. I was interested to see how life would be without all those saved bookmarks, usernames and passwords, and how difficult it would be to use other people’s computers.

It wound up being an interesting but irritating experienceand I was relieved to be back in front of my ‘home’ computer in San Francisco.

I’m writing this while looking out over the Pacific Ocean at the tip of Baja California Mexico in Cabo San Lucas on the MacBook Pro I recently bought.

I haven’t used this much until this week and it’s been very intriguing to what extent I’ve moved online. Past computer upgrade experiences have involved laborious software installations and file transfers, but this has virtually no apps on it so far apart from Adobe CS3 (and I’m experimenting with online competitors to this…).

I’m using Evernoteextensively, and the various Google apps - Reader for RSS feeds, Gmail, docs, maps etc. No Microsoft Office, no text files saved to hard drive as an experiment.

The only problem I’ve encountered is remembering online application urls on this ‘clean’ machine, I have to dip into delic.io.us or do Google searches to remember where I have accounts. (I’ve been evaluating a lot of new apps recently, i updated my location on BrightKite, not quite clear on utility of this yet and haven’t hooked it into Friendfeed either). Apart from this it’s been a painless experience (apart from resting this laptop on my sunburned thighs!).

As long as I can sync with Evernote I have an up to date version of my text files, so if I lose connection I can continue to work offline.

Within minutes of arriving at this hotel I installed Skype and was talking to my mother in the UK and showing her the view live from the laptop.

This is such a different experience to the current enormously expensive enterprise ‘vpn and desktop apps’ model it really reinforces for me the shifts ahead as hosted saas offerings become acceptably secure and non critical information is formally shared the way consumers on holiday do it (and enterprise employees informally do…).

The critical issue is being unable to connect; a good connection is essential if all your files are in the clouds and you’re on the ground…

Massive ‘worldwide computer’ utilities like Switch and lower down in the stratosphere cloud computing resources like Joyent are clearly the future: now the ever critical ‘last mile’ becomes the ‘first meter’ - the connection to the nearest broadband that will connect you to the mothership wherever you are on the planet…

I have one full pass to the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston to give away thanks to the organizers. This promises to be one of the premier events of the year and a great opportunity to mingle with key thought leaders!

I’m looking forward to four days of discussion and debate across a number of topics, including:
* Social Networking in Business
* Social Networks as New Media
* Microblogging & Twitter
* Enterprise Mash-ups
* Enterprise RSS & Syndication
* Developing a Next Generation Workforce
* Socializing Search
* Making the Right Video Conferencing Choice
* Software as a Service
* Security for Enterprise 2.0
* Office 2.0
* Presence
* Unified Communications
* Integrated Collaboration Platforms
* Enterprise Mobility

Here’s the conference website: http://www.enterprise2conf.com to explore the sessions in more detail.

Shoot me an email with your contact details to contest at olivermarks.com (this is an address I rarely use so don’t email me with other comments here!) and I’ll perform a lucky dip at the end of May. The runner up will get a free expo hall pass worth $100.

Good luck!

CBS were so impressed Dan Farber offered me a blog spot on ZDNet they bought the company this morning!

I’ve just posted my inaugural blogs here: http://blogs.zdnet.com/collaboration/ and am now officially a two blog person.

The ZDNet Collaboration 2.0 will be my primary focus over the next few months as I attempt to stoke up discussion there, but I will continue to blog here, saying things I may not want to expose ZDNet to…

I’m pretty behind getting the consulting part of this site up so that will also be a focus over the next couple of weeks prior to a couple of conferences I’ll be attending, Enterprise 2.0 and Supernova.

Despite a split second power cut that nuked my dsl connection and ensuing resets, I had a fascinating discussion this morning with France based Sigurd Rinde about ‘Thingamy’, a “Business Model Builder with instant delivery of Business Processes, Accounts and Reports.”

Sigurd screen shared the application to walk through the UI, and we had a fascinating conversation about the paradigm shifting concepts which formed the foundations of the application.

Early days yet but I think there is real promise here. Taking a big picture view, despite all the hoopla about the web over the last ten years, the reality is that people are stuck with ancient conventions which often make little sense.

Email is an obvious example: to the lay person the postal mail paradigm is made electronic by email. The only difference in thinking is dealing with volume.

This deluge perception is particularly pertinent to email, where people literally sit in cubicles processing email in enterprises - like these cats playing on a treadmill, sooner or later you’re going to slip behind…

Sigurd makes a good case that GAAP (’Generally Accepted Accounting Principles’) is a similarly outdated financial management model: ‘Thingamy’ is able to capture team ideas in real time and ammend budget costs on the fly.

It’s early days for this futuristic app, which enables agile development of semantically linked information. This results in a very lean experience that spits out contextually valuable information without all ‘busy work’ of tagging etc. It’s tough to convey paradigm breaking apps in a blog post without backup images, video etc but my feeling is that this a true Web 2.0 application that is also a harbinger of the semantically driven future.

Very impressed by an article brought to my attention by Stephen Collins, a Canberra based “Knowledge economy and knowledge work consultant, web strategist, information architect and social networking evangelist”, who is quoted in the article by author Sue Bushell.

Enterprise 2.0 - What is it good for?
A 12-step guide to getting the most out of Web 2.0 tools and making it safe-for-purposeis a lengthy (for a magazine article) but very solid piece of writing, Sue really gets into discussing some of the intractable problems faced by those attempting to role out Enterprise 2.0 inside companies.

There was a similar cover story in the US version of InformationWeek magazine during web 2.0 week by Andrew Conry-Murray whose cover read ‘Web 2.0 Rodeo‘ Herding cats is painless compared with wrangling users enamored of new collaboration tools. Here’s how to get control’that was much more lightweight and glib in comparison.

Sue’s Australian article leads with a quote from Stephen Collins

If you want to find out what tools your staff are finding most useful at the moment, just go and see what your IT department is blocking

Since both these magazines are aimed squarely at the IT community, it’s impressive that this reality is publicized in Australian CIO, whose advertising revenue presumably comes from the entrenched big players, as is the case with US InformationWeek.

Lack of a cohesive 2.0 strategy

The biggest challenge is the lack of a cohesive 2.0 strategy, which serves to confuse users, stall adoption and make 2.0 technologies tough to manage,” says Eli Weir, CTO of Seattle-based Visible Technologies.

and

..An online survey of IT leaders by Gartner found only one in seven organizations have a Web 2.0 strategy prepared, and few are ready for or are executing on Web 2.0. Gartner found few organizations knew how or where to begin determining the implications of Web 2.0. “These organizations are in for a rude awakening because we expect Web 2.0 to pose a greater threat to enterprises than the Web of the dotcom era,” Gartner says.

Obviously this is good for my sales pitch, since I am an Enterprise 2.0 collaboration strategy consultant!

Well worth reading through the twelve steps, and a couple of very solid ’sidebars’ including a short interview with Stowe Boyd which prompted this great anecdote:

CIO: …That reminds me of some of the angry feedback CIO has got on articles about “shadow IT” and the thought that users are bringing into the enterprise various technologies. What are your thoughts on that?

Stowe: I was at a big energy conglomerate a few years ago to talk to the CIO. I started my presentation. When the first slide - which was about instant messaging - went up, he said: “That’s all very interesting but we don’t allow instant messaging here.”

I went in the hall, and I got the AV guy who had set up the projector to come in, and asked him: “So how many people in the building use IM?” He said: “Oh, 50 to 60 percent.” A lot of people just want to wish it away. Beyond that, it’s very difficult to plug all the holes.

Enterprise 2.0 is very tough for IT: they are damned if they do (security concerns, having to support ‘mashups’) and damned if they don’t (blocking progress, not giving people consumer style web 2.0 tools to do their job). There is a huge ownership issue also: on a case by case basis it is sometimes more appropriate for business units to own collaboration, but then who runs support?

Great to see these thorny issues being brought out in open ended discussion, very refreshing after some of the boilerplate solution books that are fashionable this spring.

I follow Gia Lyons on Twitter; Gia is..

currently the IBM Americas Social Software Evangelist. I talk about social software, IBM Lotus Connections in particular, with customers in continents ending in “America.”

A few of Gia’s tweets really caught my eye this morning:

@gialyons “collaboration is better if folks are more aware of one another across a network, since they only collaborate with people they know exist”.

@gialyons “You’re telling me, customer, that you want an organization that collaborates better/faster/smarter.”

@gialyons “I’m telling you that this cannot happen until you increase awareness across your organization.”

@gialyons “Just giving people yet another collaboration tool will not improve awareness.”

Gia told me these tweets were inspired by a conversation she was having with Kathryn Everest, a Managing Consultant at IBM Canada.

It seems so elementary, but installing collaboration software without guidance for users is like having a party and not sending out invites. Another social analogy: if you’re going to run a social mixer it helps to define that on the invite, otherwise you get a bunch of people in a room waiting for something to happen.

One of the great strengths of the ’socialprise’ concept is to pull people together, so step one is defining who the people you are including are, telling them what the plan is and introducing them to each other!

Lotus Connections, SharePoint, LDAP directory of single sign on portal users, dedicated app or whatever, communication and training is paramount for getting people on board, familiar with the system, ready to share and comfortable working together online.

Great quote from Dan Keldsens’s BizTechTalk Blog:

Collaboration and sharing of content cannot and should not ALWAYS be out in the open.

Financial Services companies get this - that’s why they are prohibited from sharing information across the “chinese firewall” between the research and sales arms - it’s called collusion, not collaboration. That’s why pharmaceutical companies lock away their R&D - the FDA will tear them apart, as will their competitors, if there are not tight controls on their processes (including collaboration, reporting, etc.). There’s a time and place for total transparency, total secrecy, and the gray space in between.

Unlike the promiscuous app mashup world of Web2.0, Enterprise collaboration frequently gets onto very delicate ground over who is allowed to to share what with who. Security officers are paid to be vigilant in the enterprise to ensure information is used and shared appropriately: to do otherwise could prove costly…Separately, there’s a whole Sarbanes Oxley defined industry around research and reporting of information that burrows deep into a surprisingly diverse set of industries.

Dan was commenting on Forrester Research Sr analyst Jememiah Owyang’s personal blog post, in which he boosts UserVoice who, to quote UserVoice’s website, “add structure to feedback and reduce the overhead of an honest dialog with users — It creates a market around good ideas so we get more quality than quantity”. (Jeremiah focuses on ‘white label social networking platforms’ and has compiled a vendor list on his blog here).

Jeremiah put up an instance of UserVoice on his own site as an example and to play with the functionality.

This is a good example of the type of info sharing that wouldn’t pass muster in a financial services company where “sharing information across the “chinese firewall” between the research and sales arms” could result in costly penalties. Jeremiah’s point is that this type of voting functionality should be folded into white label social networking platforms, presumably with appropriate safeguards for info security.

Dan, who has an impressive depth of knowledge in the greater collaboration space seasoned by extensive experience in the knowledge management world, makes another important point:

“This entire movement is born out of the Voice of the Customer movement, itself coming from marketing techniques that go back to the earliest days of focus groups. It’s just at a different scale - small i innovation (incremental) rather than radical BIG I INNOVATION (brand new, never been seen before).”

My take from this is that while rounding up all the vendors in a space and listing them is a very valuable exercise, there is a great deal more depth to this than ‘baseball card collecting’ and listing brief key attributes of each product from sales pitch.