Business Communities in Web 2.0 Space

Web 2.0 technologies permit the mashup of community functions where they really need to be. 

Case in point:

Professional and business communities currently make use of both email and RSS feeds as notification mechanisms.  Right now, if we are not online or we are just connected via an internet-enabled PDA phone, we may only be able to receive email notifications of an important change in blog viewership or a forum topic that seriously impacts go-to-market activities around a product in beta.  If we were at the desk, we could monitor an RSS feed widget showing the most important blogs or forums we are watching.  This would be somewhat more instantaneous or convenient since we would be able to check it whenever we wish, knowing that it would be instantaneously up to date. 

How about a notification that comes into our I.M. client, or in the case of WebEx Connect, the space we have our notifications tied to?  This would be totally immediate and if there is a high-priority thread we are waiting for, this would be the best way to get the information.

It shouldn’t stop here.  What about updating a wiki post that you have going for team members to build knowledge on the experience of beta testers who are lurking in a forum?  Why make everyone read the forum in its entirety when an edited, internal wiki would be more trusted?  As a matter of fact, if reputation and ranking is enabled in the beta forums, (check out Spigit) the posts would be validated ahead of time and the mashup between the forums and the wiki would maintain integrity.  Now that’s a great mashup if there ever was one.

Now to close the loop with your evangelism blog.  Let the beta community know that we are watching and we believe in the testers that are beating up the product.  We have already benefited from their expert feedback and would like to cite these great people, enhance their reps and mention them by name (or handle) in the blog.  The blogs could contain links to the feeds of the forums in case people wanted to verify for themselves.  A mashup that publishes citations and feed links from the forums right into a Blog ‘clipboard’ so to speak allows me to bring the information full-circle from seed to harvest. 

The ‘Connected Worker’ - WebEx Connect Makes it Happen

At WebEx, we think of ourselves as ‘connected’ to co-workers, partners, customers and colleagues.  We use the web every day to maintain those connections.  Up till now, the definition of ‘connected’ was of the ’social web’ mentioned in Bryan Person’s blog. In this same blog, Bryan also mentions the potential for negative effects from too much ‘connectedness’.

I would like to build a thought upon Bryan’s concept and introduce a new connected worker.  This is a knowledge worker who not only relies on the social web for staying in touch with cohorts, but has the ability to share tools, software and data in collaborative ways not previously possible.

We are all familiar with the well established online workspace.  This is something embodied by Web Office, a product acquired by WebEx from Intranets a couple of years ago. There are others but Web Office is typical.  It allows data, appointments, documents and team communications to be shared asynchronously by teams inside and outside the corporate firewall. 

Sales Engagement Scenario

The typical account manager has a couple  of people that they work with when pursuing an opportunity.  Today, they make use of CRM or Sales Force Automation web tools, email, instant messaging and their telephones.  Closing more sales in a time period would involve a hydra-like head with cables going to all of the team members, client contacts, paperwork in process and appearing in endless meetings. Hopefully, some of these issues have been solved with the use of web 2.0 online tools such as wikis, shared chat-rooms, shared document repositories and web conferenceing.  Yes, all of these tools exist in one form or another.  But, are they somehow  integrated and focused on prosecuting a sales engagement that includes corporate memory, schedules and tasks at your fingertips and live alerts and notifications tied to the opportunity?  Multiply that by a bunch of opportunities and you ready for a vacation every week.

Look! A team workspace focused on my opportunity. It has live collaboration too?  Where do I sign up?

Space Is The Place

Look at these screen shots:

A: WebEx Connect - Q: What is Collaboration 2.0?

The Benefits of Collaboration 2.0

• Employ a flexible and powerful framework within which to collaborate
• Create spaces to hold goal-oriented collaboration
• Invite Colleagues to contribute and share
• Share and retain useful information
• Add widgets to accomplish tasks or process data
• Make user of software mashups
• Retain results and apply towards best-practices

Web 2.0 Summit - October 17-19, San Francisco, Ca.

The Web 2.0 Summit was recently held in SF at the Palace Hotel.

What is Web 2.0?

Rather than tell you myself,  I will allow someone else who has  made a study of the topic. 

Cisco/WebEx At The SalesForce.com DreamForce Conference

Sales Force has its DreamForce conference underway in San Francisco at the Moscone Center.  They are occupying a large part of the center and have a decent compliment of displaying partners.  Cisco/WebEx is one of those and has a prominently placed 20×20 stand close to the entrance of the hall.  Due to John Chamber’s good relationship with Marc Benihoff and the rigorous work of both the Cisco and WebEx development teams, we have a very fine showing of useful integrations with SFDC.

John Chambers’ keynote on Monday was completely packed with conference attendees.  Everyone (including me) wanted to experience the vision of the leader of Cisco Systems within context of SaaS, On-Demand and Platform plays like WebEx Connect and SalesForce.com.

 

John Chambers likes to get up close and personal with the audience

Chambers addressed the trends that he and Cisco have surveilled over the last decade or so and how his advice to government and industry leaders has proven out. He broadly painted a vision of the next business and personal revolution in communications and the way people work and play.  Evidenced by the younger generations who are used to instant communications, Chambers said that we have moved from a command and control mode of work to a collaborative/teamwork one. Any Cisco/WebEx folks in the audience were visibly energized by this vision as it allows WebEx to play a large role in the future of Cisco and the world itself.

 

 Here, he is demonstrating WebEx connect team collaboration.  In this slide, John and Jim Grubb, the Chief Demo Officer, created a scenario where a sales engagement using SalesForce, WebEx and Cisco unified communications would be key in closing a hesitating opportunity.  A Connect sales engagment space was created and the SalesForce opportunity easily gets mashed  with the collaborative powers of Connect.  A key contributor at the prospect company, SalesForce.com, was waffling on the decision to buy Cisco products.

At this point, John offers to bring in an SME to allay some of the prospect’s security concerns. Here, you can see a WebEx videoconference between the purchasing manager of SalesForce and a subject-matter expert at Cisco letting the prospect know how serious Cisco’s security architecture is.  He extrapolates to a painfully funny degree of detail, drawing laughs from the audience, the technical nuances of the Cisco gear.  At the end of the videoconference, the customer is still not convinced.

 To bring the deal to a close in short order, Chambers offers to call the CEO of SFDC, Mark Benihoff on Cisco High Definition TelePresence.

 

To add levity to the engagment, Mark tries to give John a haircut on the pricing and eventually relents and gives his verbal approval to purchase the Cisco gear.

The entire session with all of the detailed conversations, SME, video and verbal closing takes 15 minutes, thus proving out that rich, interactive communications, when unified with data, team workspaces and web-touch collaboration, shortens the time to close and makes for a memorable experience for the customer and vendor in the next generation online business engagments.

John received rousing applause and handily delivered the Cisco/WebEx Unified Collaboration vision of the future.

Another 2.0 Conference? Hmmm, Office 2.0.

The office was 2.0 , but so was the conference itself. Held in if not the, one of the toniest hotels in SF.  The ultra-modern St. Regis, squeezed into a city block with a very small area to pull a car in, scratches the skyline like a glass and steel megalith. 

Fitting, the conference would be held where the 3 year old building struts its stuff behind a crowd of visionaries, knowledged-up workers carrying and fondling iPhones all day while listening to prophets of 2.0 technology.  Conference Link

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Oh, what a conference - 

Without really re-living the panache’, ‘elan and verve’ of what came from the mind of Ismael Gualimi, I can easily say that this conference was far different than many I have attended.   Besides insisting that everyone get an iPhone so they could watch live video from the sessions, streamed by Veodia (connect partner) he fed us with very carefully selected foodstuffs during the breaks.  I mean gourmet all the way.   Notwithstanding that knowledge workers and high-tech people like all of that stuff, his demo ‘pods’ were novel.  You had to use the Intel iMac or nothing.  Well, we solved that by installing bootcamp (alternate Windows XP O/S that made the MAC look like a windows PC.  In essence, it was because the CPU is the same one in my family-sized Dell laptop.  So there.

Now, the real work -

While at O2Con, Steffen and I had the opportunity to test-drive the new Act-On software email campaign space.  Chris Logan, marketing manager of Act-On, came by and installed the widgets, created the space and gave us some training.  We were able to demonstrate quite a bit of cool functionality including directly reaching into SalesForce.com databases, pulling leads, engaging with Google AdWords, touching EventCenter’s API, creating an event and tracking the registrations.  Chris sat down with me for a video heads-up shoot and gives some value-prop evangelism on the mashup between Act-On and WebEx Connect.

 

Chris Logan of Act-On Software

Here is a tour Chris Logan did of the Act-On/Connect solution space

Steffen gave a lot of demos.  He was demonstrating the Virtual Emergency Operations Center space as well as showing off our Connect Ecosystem space.

 Diane Davidson sits on a Community Panel

Others who dropped by include some of the following:

www.longjump.com – CRM and app mashup platform. Their focus is in the Media space, newspapers, broadcast, cable companies. 

 www.docgle.com – Document management in the cloud. 

www.inetoffice.com – Includes a cool word processor that runs completely online.  Collaborative capabilities, team interworking, rich content inclusion etc.  inetWord is the word processor. 

www.timebridge.com – It has good integration with exchange and outlook wherein lies the problem.  They showed meeting conflict resolution which is a great thing but again, very dependant on Exchange and outlook.  

www.gliffy.com – Graphic environment – sort of like visio online. 

www.huddle.net  - Received a demo by their product strategy director.  Like a virtual web office.  

www.jivesoftware.com  - They provided the site for the conference.  Jive recently received around $20mm in new VC funding.  They have recently implemented Ajax widgets on their ClearSpace site.

Connections

Informational, Experiential Connections 

Neural or global, we are talking about networks.  Where do we delineate the boundries?  Recent discoveries of the similarity between human brain and computer data storage have led to a notion of bionic-cybernetic connections already in place today.  Information can originate from either cyber or neural networks. Moving information from neural networks to cybernetworks is trivial.  We input data in our daily lives.  It is either deliberately injected into our computer systems and networks or our behavior is captured by data-gathering activities (Internet, media & consumer behaviours) beyond our control.  Information and knowledge can come to us through diverse media with the last mile being an analog transducer (TV, CD, DVD, Radio, Phone) or a digital computer. 

I/O’s

Right now, devoid of direct computer interfaces to our own neural networks, we are dependant upon sensory i/o’s.  The fidelity of these sensors depends on analog factors having to do with visual, aural and in some cases tactile stimuli, offering a slightly different experience for each individual.  To correct for this ‘error’ requires overhead to calibrate or agree on references to color, tone, meaning and a host of other variations in our experience. With a unified experience, a pure information transfer would take place.

Different Takes

Don’t forget how diverse points of view (object - vantage point - perspective) make for creative scenarios when solving problems.  However, knowledge shared does not always result in a consensus. 

Definition at the outset, offers the potential for a progressive approach to be taken with group input, forward progress, critique, modification, and perfection. By reaching a consensus on the facts, the group can build a complex idea upon a solid foundation.

Interface

Linking of neural with cyber networks is taking place every day.  A user, inputting data from their mind to a digital document on their computer completes the act of interfacing bio and cyber systems. This hybrid network consisting of a conceptual bridge between personal knowledge and Internet Web knowledge is unique for each individual.

Multi-Point Connection of Unique Hybrid Networks  

Linking of personal hybrid networks in a multi-point connection results in scalable group structures.  These structures can map onto various communications models. If for analysis, construction or problem-solving, the group benefits from the combined knowledge and input of the members.  The result is for multiplicative deductive, associative and intuitive degrees of discovery and fulfills the sum-greater-than-parts expectation.

Mapping of Group Structures to a Scalable Communications Model

The individuals join a voice-only teleconference. Each maintains a detached (from each other) connection to their personal computer and network databases.  A roundtable discussion ensues where individuals are calling up private data to expound on the subject at hand.  With tight focus on a topic, google searches pull up the same information for all group members almost simultaneously.  Group knowledge is not improved but a consensus is reached.

Next, the group scribbles notes, and critical feedback on a shared bulletin board. This is done asynchronously and at their leisure.  This develops as an async chat room would. Each return visit to the board will show progressively critical feedback with improvement in consensus. 

At some point an evolutionary concept emerges that was a product of the baseline state.  This could not have emerged without the exercise of perfecting the baseline. 

Finally, the group rolls the board  and all live conference minutes up into a shared workspace or virtual think-tank. Now they can communicate live, capture all interactions and retrieve and share all live, online and archived data sources for all to see.

FlowThrough

Getting conceptual here ..  FlowThrough refers to information and knowledge as they move through the many minds in the world interested in using it.  Sometimes it goes right through without modification or derivation.  Ideas come from bits and pieces of information, concepts and images passing into and out of people’s minds.  One realizes that in a way, this process is self-replicating as in the wider physical universe whereby planets and other heavenly bodies are made up of remnants of exploded stars moving around in a vast space. 

Knowledge and learning are radiant in nature.  Ideas ripple through our consciousness, passing through our minds like a radio transmission. Since humans have the propensity to share, this knowledge is transmitted to anyone interested in receiving it.  Anyone around to listen will get a copy. This also encourages temporary ownership of the orginal data, voluntary modification or expansion, building of new data from the old and eventually, live, realtime colaboration to affirm, extrapolate or nullify new types of ideas. 

In the conditions spoken about earlier, human communication tends to resemble other processes of nature such as the expansion of the cosmos.  With the idea of FlowThrough, we cry for lower resistance to knowledge, easier exchange of information and better understanding of new concepts. 

Alternative View #1 - Task - Solve a complex problem as a group. 

A small number of people, spread around the globe possess as a group, all of the knowledge to solve a particular problem.  Each has a piece of the puzzle.  To foster their creativity and allow the least constrained work environment, they are not brought together in a physical location.  Instead, they create a virtual thinktank

where their ideas, data files, supporting theories and research results are placed for each member of the group to consume.  At key times, individuals draw on a virtual whiteboard, sketches of their ideas.  At future times, others, using different markers draw over previous sketches for others to freely view.  Another member leaves a message for the group that it may be a good time to gather in the tank, live and online to discuss and further develop their ideas.

While together, they can markup drawings, documents and share their computer desktops freely.  All of these interactions can be recorded and perused at their leisure. 

A shared calendar is exposed to the group as well as the member contact info and online status and presence.

This virtual think-tank can be replicated with a template and regenerated for different problems, groups or objectives.  Think of what happens to knowledge in this state:  It gets to flow-through everyone’s computers, the network and ultimately their minds.