There are many tools to accomplish this. The variety becomes a problem because clients may see it as a shopping list. The real issue is the usability. If you do NOTHING online, do you expect an analyst to go to the stock exchange or regulator, or your company’s head office, and ask there for a report at reception? Of course not.

Its a continuum, stretching from extreme discomfort at getting public information, to extreme ease of use. The client has to decide where to jump off this line. As it is all really low-cost technology, the question should not be solely around cost.

continuum of investor information

What one must bear in mind, is that we live in a multi-channel world. By making all the formats in the graph available, some will still choose to have a printed report, others a PDF, others will only concern themselves with the Excel while some will have scanned the newspaper.

You can’t be all things to all people, but you can give all the options to all people.

• this content management tool doesn’t accept my MS Word tabs and indents! Shriek!
• I just want to print one piece of paper off this website page, not all 20! Rant!
• Search on my site doesn’t find the document I put up on the intranet last week! Rail!

An essential point about client education was made by Dominic Jones in a different forum: XBRL. I quote:

Most US investor relations officers (IROs) are not directly involved in disclosure technology and have a very poor understanding of it. This is mostly because about 75% of investor relations sections on US corporate websites are outsourced to hosting services. IROs have generally been entirely hands off when it comes to these sites so they’ve lost out on a lot of important learning over the years. They don’t understand what HTML is, so XBRL is even more alien to them.

As much as we think of expediency and taking problems out of the clients’ hands (or outsourcing those to us in these times), it makes us party to them not knowing more about the technology issues. The cycle continues.

Taking a leaf out of the “teach a man to fish” parable, I’m going to escalate the training of clients. Not just in terms of social knick-knacks, but along the lines of: What Every IRO Should Know.

It seems its coming to pass with the ESME project, through SAP labs.

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They’ve adapted the retail and sociological ideas of the Long Tail into how it is relevant for the organisations’ internal mechanisms. And it fits.

The Long Tail theory is essentially that the web is so vast, one can satisfy niche desires without creating uncostly overheads ie: you can sell something of little demand, and also sell that of massive demand simply because storage, and shipping in the online world is not a factor. The same is true of media: some blogs and op-ed pieces have great following, however it does not detract or disqualify from blogs with small audiences. They can co-exist, unlike in the old media world where there are costs and economies of scale associated with any publication.

The way this works in the enterprise is thus: IT has large, visible and critical applications that it has to occupy itself with at any given time. Other needs have to wait, get political backing or get in the queue. However, the influx of digital natives and social media have made knowledge workers competent enought to create their own simple applications or use existing web applications or services that come free.

In order to aid and abet this, Serena has introduced a Mashup Composer. Althought I’ve not played with it, it appears to be something along the lines of Yahoo! Pipes and the Google open APIs. Think of it as the guy in Accounts who had cred because he could write macros. And who replicated himself.

This new approach enables power users in the business and IT to quickly address their everyday needs, while freeing scarce application development resources to focus on more complex tasks.

IT concerns? Of course. The mashups will be built on top of existing architecture, and it seems like it will consume existing web services rather than write to critical databases.

Love it or hate it, Facebook and other social media are here and they’re changing the online habits of your employees and customers. It would be churlish to dismiss social media as a fad with no impact on your organisation other than being a tool for employees to squander their billable time; at the same time, Facebook is not going to propel your company into an early listing just because it has the undivided attention of tens of millions of users. Right about now, you have a IT policy in place regarding use of social media or are undecided about what action to take.

Time to take a step back and do a business case on this phenomenon. The purpose of this article is for you to realise what lessons and habits your employees and online customers have learned in the last few months while being introduced to social media. Consider these , and then discuss them within your own organisations. Don’t be stuck on Facebook, your employees are probably using other Web 2.0, or social media, applications on an hourly basis.

1                   Web publishing is simple

Ten years ago the message was “anyone can publish a web page. Learn a little HTML, some Photoshop, some odds and ends about HTTP and web hosting and there you go!”. This spawned a cottage industry of web designers and web design courses, but lets face it: it required a steep learning curve in languages and standards that were changing every few months.

Blogs are far easier to set up, but people from non-creative industries or non-media types have to think long and hard about design, posting, commenting and plug-ins. Its no surprise that most blogs reference “web 2.0″ or “social media”. While blogging is a tsunami, it doesn’t get everyone publishing.

Enter Facebook. A simple setup process, no level design playing field, click-n-play plugins and publishing in a manner more similar to text or instant messaging than email or word processing.

The business case: employees will finally be able to take short cuts and ask questions like: wouldn’t it be simpler to put this online? Can’t we create a mash up of our sales figures and geographical areas like the travel apps in Facebook? (The answer to both is Yes).

2                   Facebook is a start page

Enterprise applications like SAP and Microsoft Sharepoint allow one to set personalised home pages on their intranet start pages or as their default browser pages. Facebook is similar, except the information on it is mostly of a personal nature.

The business case: you may want to consider pulling Facebook’s notifications as an RSS feed into your existing employees’ start pages. In that way they can keep abreast of friend’s movements at a glance from within their business application. This may sound abhorrent to some policy makers, but ask your IT to do a test implementation for you and you’ll see how innocuous it is. Will it keep employees of the phone and emailing? I don’t know the answer to that question, but consider this option if you don’t want to ban Facebook outright.

3                   Social networking online

When you send your sales, marketing and client service to a conference, do you exhort them to network their buns off? Probably not in as many words, but that’s what you want. Surely your enterprising employees will use online social networks to initiate joint partnerships or get valuable information, perhaps even to disseminate your company news in this channel (for free). If you manage IT staff you would be foolish to discourage them from joining sites like Experts Exchange, Slashdot or Tech Republic. When they hit a coding snag they can submit the question online or nose around the forums for the answer, rather than spend two days trying to reinvent the wheel.

Facebook has most likely informed your employees about how to leverage their social network (even though some will only use Facebook to organise parties and send chain mail!)

The business case: Social networking online is a way to make customers gather around product (Amazon), supply you with invaluable ideas (Dell Ideastorm) and engage with approved demographically-selected profiles (eons).

4                   Naked communication

A person’s personality comes through on Facebook more so than in any other medium. Those who boast offline, boat on Facebook. Those who sent chain letters with Hello Kitty drawings at age 8 do the same on Facebook at a more advanced age. That is the power of the medium, people manage not only their relationships but their personas through it. This naked communication builds stronger online and offline relationships.

The business case: like Amazon’s recommendations, Digg’s articles and del.icio.us bookmarks, users trust content generated by their peers, known or unknown, more than what businesses tell them to believe. This is evidenced in Facebook and other social media, and your business ought to have a strategy in place to interact and monitor this channel.

5                   Friends

Can a  22 year-old be friends with a multinational car manufacturing corporation? Can Barack Obama be friends with thousands of potential voters? In Facebook you can. You can even have stronger relationships with entities than with friends you see every weekend for dinner. It may be a perversion of the concept of friendship, but its the term we’re saddled with when we try and explain these relationships. Users and customers can be friends with your brand, usually around a competition, cause or campaign. This is free permission marketing, are you still complaining?

The business case: we learned that people trust the official line when published in a blog format more so than when it comes as a press release off the wires. In the same way, an intranet modified into more of a social network, a customer care section of your website or a graduate recruitment site will benefit from bringing your brand to the level of peer rather than patriarch.

6                   Always-on culture

Generally speaking, the last two generations in the workplace don’t  like the commitment of formal telephone calls. They weren’t taught telephone etiquette and the concept of “taking a message” is beyond them. Sometimes one uses a SMS or IM message as a status checker: are you in? can you make it? The pressure is taken off having to tell a white lie, which is not as easy when speaking to someone in real time over the telephone.

Facebook’s status updates allow you to mention in a brief, pithy manner about your whereabouts, mood and recent events in your life. Friends are notified immediately, and will act thereupon by contacting you directly, leaving you alone, or not bothering to schedule a meeting for you as you have stated that you’re ill or on leave.

The business case: Churches are increasingly blogging their sermons to their communities. Some people just don’t want to attend church but they want the information, much like workers who hate meetings but want to participate in the project nonetheless. What if your board gave brief updates to the other members or subordinates in a secure environment once a day? They could pass on critical leads or thoughts that others could action or research the merits thereof. Teams could get rapid updates rather than gathering in time-consuming meetings, analysts could offer rapid assessments of stock and send out to subscribers in all the various formats.

When getting approval from a client around some material or dealing with a supplier, you’ll find IM is faster than email. You can store the conversations for later reference. The stand out in this area is Rackspace, the hosting provider. After spending a few minutes on their site, a window pops up with a sales assistant asking if you need help. You can then ask questions and answers to them, with audio or simply through the IM interface.

7                   The Internet is a raw document repository

Google taught us that you can find anything online. Wikipedia taught us that information about everything can be found online. Facebook taught us that anyone you would want to find is probably online. This is a simplification, as others have identified class differences between MySpace and Facebook, not to mention those who are not even online. If you are reading this, however, and can identify with the issues, then you know that your kindergarten playmates or high school sweethearts are a click away from discovery.

The business case: managers tried to block the internet and they tried to block IM. That was until they realised the benefits for productivity and communication inherent in both. Facebook and other social networks may have business applications that are not immediately apparent.

8                   Microblogging

I believe microblogging will be the preferred communication method of the near future. The current providers allow one to text, IM, email, blog or phone updates to your personal blog. The updates are then disseminated by notifications like RSS, email, IM, text etc. Publishing and dissemination are therefore combined in one medium through many devices, something which standard websites and phones cannot replicate. This is where Enterprise 2.0 will be focussing its attention right now.

The status updates of Facebook and the wall posts as well as the notifications of your friends are just as in microblogging.

The business case: microblogging allows for sending and receiving key updates through all technical devices. Project updates or urgent information release (See the LA Fire Department’s microblog) are native to microblogs.

9                   Fad

Sure, Facebook is also a fad. Remember at school you had fads like marbles, collecting cards, hairstyles and clothes styles? They were great, then the powers-that-were moved on them and banned them. The fad usually went underground and the fad mutated into a cult. Feelings against the school management were probably soured for a while. Things may or may have not been written on lavatory walls. Tongues in cheek aside, the same is happening in corporates world-wide.

The business case: everything in social media is, for the corporate, a threat and an opportunity. What usually tips the scale into the overall positive side is that everything is measurable. People can blog about you, but you can blog about yourself and respond to them too. And you can track when somebody mentions you in a blog post. The same principle applies to Facebook and other social media.

10             Knowledge gathering

Since employees have been given internet access to perform their tasks better, they have usually been updated with links and jokes and websites and now Facebook. They’ve been exposed to more disparate information and interest groups than they would probably have found in that evening’s newspapers. This is a part of the great tradition of the Enlightenment, and as mentioned above, they will place worth in content not only coming from the traditional news sources.

The business case: if you are in a creative field, I would suggest giving employees limited or unlimited internet access, underpinned with a performance contract. I would also set aside two hours for a meeting at the end of the week where everyone has to report on what they found online that could contribute to the business aims of the organisation. A reward of more access could be considered? Then your internet and bandwidth can be assessed as a valid business tool, and you and your employees will be reaping the benefits that social media is infusing into our traditional media channels.

Corporations have had to react to the phenomenon, ranging from banning use of Facebook outright, through to limiting use thereof to the marketing departments, to creating an official presence on Facebook and tying the company profile into graduate recruitment and news dissemination.

Don’t base your Facebook decision on appearing cool to your employees or external stakeholders. Rather look at the points made above, distribute to staff and convene an open discussion with their own points of view. You could see financial or productivity rewards, or perhaps you may only establish a better dialogue with staff and your customer base.

Remember, this is social media. A top-down approach to information distribution usually lands bottoms up.

One struggles to define Web 2.0 and social media to the uninitiated, even explaining Enterprise 2.0 and the Attention Economy to the initiated (unless you’re Mike).

Then you get arcane and difficult concepts like Zeitgeist /ˈtsaɪtˌgaɪst/ Pronunciation Key – Show Spelled Pronunciation[tsahyt-gahyst], Stream of Consciousness, Knowledge Management and Schadenfreude /ˈʃɑdnˌfrɔɪdə/ Pronunciation Key – Show Spelled Pronunciation[shahd-n-froi-duh].

The first three are best explained by pointing to things like tag clouds, tumblr, social bookmarking.

The last is best explained by how you felt when Australia and New Zealand exited the Rugby World Cup

An Intranet start page is a valuable piece of real estate. You can decide who gets to see what based on roles and permissions, ensure that everyone is fed group-wide announcements and even get brand-buy in by exposing your employees to your products, messages or even corporate identity on that space. HR situations such as “I didn’t get the email” or “that A3-sized safety warning must have fallen off the wall while I plugged my fingers into the socket” may be averted to some degree.

Web start pages target the individual user and aim to provide them with their favourite links, feeds and widgets. They have really come a long way from the days of Windows Active Desktop. Google, Netvibes, Pageflakes, My Yahoo! are playing in this space and making their start pages almost indispensable, much like the portal strategies of a few years ago wanted.

Google personalised start page

Intranet start pages and web start pages are quite different: one facilitates work for the enterprise, the other provides a launching pad into the web mostly for general interest. Now I like a CMS for my documents and I like web pages for their “Daily Me” functionality. How can they be merged?

I don’t have access to an intranet full-time, I consult from my notebook. There is no point in setting up a start page in my browser saying “Me, do this!”, “Well done I!”, “Comment on this document and send to self for review”. However, I do use a content management system (Drupal) to categorise my research, past articles and files related to my own bookkeeping. It runs online as well as offline when I may be somewhere with fluctuating or no connectivity (read: beach). Microsoft desktop applications have never made it intuitive to manage your own server on your desktop, and even the lag time with waiting for the native document format, Word, to open or close has turned me off it.

Content management system

I would like to see an online service that will be the first thing I open (after my eyes and the kettle) which acts as the current web start pages do. My RSS feeds, my widgets, probably some more interactivity with my own blogs. However, when I take my notebook offline, I would love it if I had that service on my own machine so that I could use it as a CMS for my articles, blog posts, get to read those RSS items that I’d starred but never got around to. Then when my wife says “No internet today!” I can concur but still take my essential reading along.

When I go online, the service would ask me what I’d like to upload to live, re-sync and all would be well with the world again. Perhaps when I view a page online I could select it for offline viewing, where the service uses some smart screen-scraping to provide me with just the post or article, not the visual gumph that comes with it. Go online again, and the screen scraping info gets submitted towards the semantic web project.

It would store my local files online as a backup or for sharing. That way, the web and desktop are both used as a platform, both with the latest copies. The application probably most likely to effect this is Google Gears, an open source browser extension that lets you create web applications that can run offline.

Essentially I want the freedom of a web start page with the structure and support of a local CMS. The two should be the same service. I know with a bit of working around one could get this working, and that one can theoretically achieve these aims with products like Google Gears and Google Documents.

I would probably accept cached advertising if it was a free service, so that when I view offline I still get the advertisements that were meant for my online experience. Otherwise I would pay for such a service in my personal capacity. For an enterprise? Syncing already works well or logging into your intranet via VPN, although you may have marketers without constant access to the network and they would do well to be able to display from their notebooks without relying on connectivity. Salesforce.com have done something along these lines using Gears. Their graph for depicting the process is as follows:

Salesforce.com process using Gears

I would like to the start pages vendors or the embedded service players like Google and Yahoo! step into this market. Other technologies flying around at the moment like Yahoo! Pipes (mashups), XUL, Google Office applications, MS Sharepoint (enterprise 2.0 enabled) and plain Open Source projects are all brilliant solutions looking for a problem.

Perhaps they can begin with the marriage of the desktop to the web.

Admittedly, that sounds dramatic. However, if you have juniors who are more adept at networking, real knowledge management and rapid turnaround times than your incumbents, you may find yourself with a hierarchical problem.

Vertigo
On that note, the research rings a bell with a favoured theme of mine: vertigo and the silo approach. Web 2.0 is as horizontal as you can get. I know vertical communities and vertical search sound sexy and practical and make easy Powerpoint slides, but reality is different. Information-seekers mill about your corporate website like indoor dogs on rainy day to get a feel, you can’t push them down silos.

Surprise! Investors, analysts, applicants, suppliers and journalists do the same. You would be a poor fool if you just took the official line, and didn’t probe a bit more.

If this current working generation is the multi-task generation, the ‘digital natives‘ must be the multi-source generation.

The second easiest way is to find ways of allowing this to happen inside the firewall which can be as simple as sticking in some low cost or free tools and then making sure your existing organisation can:

Dimension Data recently published a paper, Seven Key Considerations for Deploying Unified Communications Successfully, by Gavin Hill. I wish their superlative research allowed one to comment or engage with it (missed opportunity), but to the 7 points:

1. Organisational Culture and Change Management
2. Environmental Considerations
3. Architecture
4. Security
5. Ongoing Support
6. Enterprise Integration
7. Project Management

Hill readily acknowledges the impact that IM is having on the enterprise, as well as Presence and collaboration servers (Sharepoint). If knowledge workers are to have the autonomy and tools made available to them to facilitate enterprise 2.0 behaviours, their CIOs and support staff would do well to read this paper.

Graphs by Forrester