4.4.-March11_BusinessImpact

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Collaboration Towww.technologyreview.com

MARCH

Collaboration Tools

BUSINESSIMPACT

The Authority on theFuture of TechnologyMarch 2011www.technologyreview.

Published by MIT




Business leaders have been payingattention to how much time theiremployees are spending on Face-

book and Twitter. Now they want to har-ness that energy. Business are looking for

social media tools for the workplace that will encourage their workers to collaborate.

Developers have responded with busi-ness software packages that mimic all thetools of social networks and microblogs,

but aimed at the o ce: personal pro lepages that showcase an employee’s expertise,microblogs for progress updates, shareddocuments, and searchable networks thatlet employees who’ve never met connect

with each other.In this issue, we catch up with thought

leaders in business collaboration, along with the leading companies working todevelop the next game-changing com-munication tool for the workplace. Andit’s worth the e ort: Companies that haveused such collaborative software report sav-ing money on consultants when employ-ees shared insights across divisions (see

“How a Reorganization Spurred the Needfor ‘The Wiki,’” page 22.)

The collaboration software market hasattracted well-established IT leaders along-

side some well-funded startups. In “SocialTools for Business,” page 12, we learn thatIBM’s homegrown software Lotus Connec-tions was designed to connect the company’s400,000 employees, but it was so success-ful that IBM now sells Lotus Connectionsas a product—and it’s a leader in the social business software market.

Many leading startups in collaborationsoftware are purposely designing their tools

to function like Twitter and Facebook. In“Yammer Gets Workers Hooked First, then Woos Bosses,” page 15, you’ll see that employees can join independently and be instantly introduced to fellow employees.

The potential of collaborative businesssoftware wasn’t lost on Facebook cofounderDustin Moskovitz. He left his role as vicepresident of engineering at Facebook in2008 to start Asana (see page 18). Mos-kovitz envisioned Asana as a tool to connectdaily activities at work the way Facebookdoes for life outside the o ce. Some 100organizations currently use Asana’s invita-tion-only beta trial, which is set to becomemore open later this year.

On the other hand, collaboration isn’t just

about the tools that enable it. Evan Rosen, aSan Francisco-based consultant and authorof The Culture of Collaboration , says thacompanies often confuse technology withcollaboration (see page 9). If a company’sculture is more about competition, he says,then no amount of tools will help.

Nonetheless, early adopters are comingforward to share their success stories.

SAP takes advantage of its own toolsand global reach to collaborate on projectsquickly. In “Making Smart Hando s,” page

24, you’ll see how SAP employees will hando important projects from its headquartersin Germany to sta ers in California. In turn,North American workers will hand o theirproject to colleagues in Asia. This kind of collaboration is making a real di erence:most recently, SAP used this method to workaround supply-chain disruptions caused by the Japanese triple crisis of earthquake,tsunami, and nuclear disaster.

CONTENTS

The Big Question

2 Collaboration: Your Next Advantage Impact Points7 Google’s Real-Time Messaging Tool Leaders5 How to Use Collaboration Technology6 Streams of Information8 The Psychology of Collaboration9 It Takes More than Technology11 Connect, Communicate, Collaborate Emerged Technologies12 Social Tools for Business

13 SharePoint Tries to Keep Up14 Please Update Your Status at Work15 Yammer Gets Workers Hooked First16 Not Your Father’s Intranet18 Facebook for the Workplace New Business Models19 Collaborating by Connecting Websites20 Crowds of Workers, on Demand Case Studies21 IBM Experiments on Itself22 The Need for ‘The Wiki’23 The Chaos of a Thousand Voices24 Making Smart Handoffs Infographics25 Social Networks at Work

BUSINE SS IMPACTis published monthly by Technology Review

Deputy EditorBrian Bergstein

Assistant Managing EditorTimothy Maher

Art DirectorLee Caul eld

Design DirectorConrad Warre

Staff EditorsKatherine Bourzac, Kevin Bullis, Lauren Cox,Kristina Grifantini, Erica Naone, Tom Simonite,Brittany Sauser, Emily Singer

Copy ChiefLinda Lowenthal

Let’s Get TogetherSocial networks like Facebook used to be seen as a big time-waste atwork; now businesses are tapping the appeal of such sites to make iteasier for their employees to work together and innovate.By LAUREN COX

Executive Summary



Collaboration Tools business impact March 2011

The Big Question

Since the dawn of managerial capi-talism, collaboration and work havealmost always been synonymous.

People need other people to realize theirgreatest impact, and innovation, perhapsthe most valuable activity in business,depends critically on the kind of cross-pol-lination of ideas that collaboration enables.

But technology has changed how we col-laborate, especially since the communica-tions revolution began 150 years ago withthe telegraph and the telephone. This waveof change continued with the commercial-ization of the fax machine in the 1970s andof e-mail in the 1980s. The last 20 years

have brought a convergence of communica-tions and computing technologies that hasexpanded the possibilities for technology-enabled collaboration, whether synchro-nous or asynchronous, proximal or distant.

With voice mail, videoconferencing, instantmessaging, chat forums, blogs, wikis, socialnetworking, microblogging (through ser-

vices such as Twitter), telepresence, and, of course, mobile communications and com-puting, never have we had so many waysto collaborate without having to be in the

same place at the same time.Technology-based platforms explicitly designed for collaboration arose in the late1980s with the concept of “groupware” or

“collaborative work environments.” Thesemade it possible for people to join forceseven though they were working in di erentplaces and in di erent time zones. LotusNotes brought the notion to the corporatemarket at a time when business use of the

Internet was still in its infancy. As the jour-nalist David Kirkpatrick wrote in 1992, “the

very de nition of an o ce may change.” With

admirable prescience, he noted: “You will be able to work e ciently as a member of agroup wherever you have your computer. Ascomputers become smaller and more pow-erful, that will mean anywhere.”

That prediction has become reality, espe-cially since the recent nancial downturn. As businesses cut back on workers and resources,the number of professionals who de nedthemselves as freelancers increased to 30million in the United States alone, and many of them turned to social-networking sites,

such as LinkedIn and Facebook, to buildtheir businesses. Many people who remainedemployed used the same strategies as aninsurance policy against the next reductionin force. They also compensated for leanerIT budgets by supplying their own hardware, leading to new acronyms such as BYOD(“bring your own device”). In fact, Kraft Foods

“coöpted” employee-owned smart phones andtablets, explicitly welcoming and supporting

“third-party” devices not directly purchased by the company.

Such policies, in turn, created a newkind of corporate culture, because work-ers equipped with their own smart phonesand notebooks became accustomed to usingthose devices in whatever ways they chose.They demanded freedom of access to richmedia websites (like YouTube), social-net-

working platforms, and certain content providers (such as WikiLeaks and publishersof its documents, like the New York Times

and CNN.com) that many corporations andgovernment entities had blocked for reasonsof bandwidth costs, data protection, and

corporate security. One senior Dell execu-tive I’ve come across argued that if he wasgoing to spend 60 to 80 hours a week at

work, the company had no business deem-ing any content on the Web o limits. TheDell executive prevailed.

As we’ ll see in the articles, interviews,and case studies in this edition of Business

Impact , network-enabled collaboration both within and between rms is changing workin fundamental ways.

To fuel this revolution, established com-

panies and startups are o ering tools andplatforms that support ever more power-ful means of collaboration. Their businesspropositions are predicated on Metcalfe’sLaw: as linkages among individuals increasearithmetically, collaboration as a result of those linkages rises in value geometrically.That’s why many companies seeking to accel-erate the pace of innovation turn to openinnovation.

Here are seven themes to watch for:1. Consumerize everything. Just as work-

ers have exed more muscle in their choicesof smart devices and online resources, theirexpectations have changed even regardingthe physical appearance of many work-places. It makes sense that one U.K. designrm, Morgan Lovell, specializes in creatingo ces that look like living rooms and cafés,to stimulate more interaction. By the sametoken, many tech platforms for collaborationdraw upon experiences from the consumer

world. In its heyday, Linden Lab’s SecondLife hosted a dealership for Toyota’s Scion

brand, which enabled buyers to customizetheir prospective new cars while exchang-ing ideas with one another. Researchers atUC Irvine, with a $3 million National Sci-ence Foundation grant, now plan to study how online virtual worlds and multiplayergames such as World of Warcraft can helporganizations collaborate and compete moree ectively.

Less radical is the appearance at IBM

Technology Will Make

Collaboration Your Next Competitive AdvantageNew tools are changing the way people work with each other, theircompanies’ partners, and their customers.By JEFFREY F. RAYPORT




The Big Question

of collaboration software that has put cor-porate garb on many familiar consumerapplications: examples include Dogear (Deli-cious-like social bookmarking), Blue Twit (aproprietary Twitter knocko ), and Social-Blue (an internal social-networking platformstrongly resembling Facebook). Similarly,Cisco’s collaboration software, called Quad,integrates WebEx along with third-party resources like Twitter and personalizedRSS feeds. But the casual-looking interface

should not mislead: Quad also includes an“enterprise policy manager console,” whichmonitors task accountability, individual pro-ductivity, and policy compliance.

2. It’s all about the culture. InternationalData Corporation, an IT research rm, arguesthat we’re entering “a new phase of businesscollaboration” based on the “intersectionof Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, and collabora-tion tools to form the social business.” These

“social business” functions resemble what weknow as the social Web: people connecting,conversing, sharing, and interacting onlinein grappling with common business goals.Essential functions include other familiarfeatures of the social Web: blogs, microb-logs, voting, ranking, RSS, tags, and wikisfor what IDC calls “people-centric collabo-ration and communication” that is “open,synchronous, and unstructured.”

When all of this works, it becomes the

“human cloud”—a concept that entered tech-nology circles only a couple of years ago. Thisis a corporate resource that transcends thecorporation, by linking its employees notonly to one another but also to customers,partners, suppliers, and third-party resources.

Yet such tools “merely o er the potential forcollaboration,” argues Evan Rosen, a leadingthinker in this eld. “Unlocking the value of tools happens only when an organization ts

tools into collaborative culture and processes.If the culture is hierarchical and internally competitive, it will take more than tools

to shift the culture.” In other words, don’tassume that high-performance collabora-tion will happen just because you have thetools to make it possible. Collaboration isa social phenomenon, and it has to t withthe culture of an organization.

3. Cherish your experts, not your docu-ments. The most compelling promise of thehuman cloud is that peer-to-peer networks(or networks of networks) will create value ina business. Patent protection aside, the valueof corporate intellectual property diminishes

with every passing month, given how quickly rivals can imitate products. Witness how fastHTC matched the touch-screen interfaceof Apple’s “revolutionary” iPhone using the

Android OS. Companies often use a func-tion known as “knowledge management” toretain, classify, and search internal docu-ments, but what happens when the value of those materials goes to zero in record time?The focus changes from the documents tothe experts—the people who can create thenext innovations.

Consider a recent initiative at Intuit. Inthe company’s words, it created a platformcalled Brainstorm as “to encourage collabo-ration throughout an organization and helpput good ideas to work faster.” It shows thehuman cloud in action (“get the best talentavailable regardless of location”). You can’tnd talent without “visibility,” so a criticalcomponent of Brainstorm is “tagging” experts

within the organization. Intuit provided aplatform where employees could post chal-lenges, and declared 10 percent of its employ-

ees’ time “unstructured” to fuel the “supply side.” Further, Intuit recruited a dozen col-lege students into a development program.They, in turn, brought into Intuit any con-sumer-based collaboration tools they liked,including Facebook, Google Docs, wikis and blogs. Recognition systems rewarded whatmattered most: “people shaping ideas andmaking connections.” The result? Participa-tion in innovation activities increased vefold. G

R I E T C O R N I L L E




The Big Question

work is its intangibility. It’s hard to visual-ize remote colleagues or a set of abstracttasks. The most promising collaboration

tools, thus, are those that provide updatesfrom team members, relevant news feeds,project reports, deadline alerts, and other

visual reminders that make the intangibletangible. This is especially critical for work-ers who are alone in remote locations or whocollaborate on abstract tasks.

For example, DreamWorks Animationcreated a global work space called VirtualStudio Collaboration. It combines anima-tion design tools with high-de nition vid-eoconferencing to let creators around the

world work together on feature lms. Theircollaboration, once sequential, now takesplace in real time—and the technology makestheir connections palpable and immediate.

Similarly, some argue that the success of Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner was due in part tothe way the company integrated collabora-tive tools with the applications that engi-neers use to design the products themselves.Rival Airbus, which lacked such high-tech visualization tools, simultaneously su eredexpensive failures, including delays in deliv-

ering the A380.Many leading collaboration tools (includ-ing Jive, Traction, and SocialText) specializein visualization of collaboration “streams.” Inaddition, technologies such as near- eld com-munications (NFC) can make collaboratorseven more “real” to one another by trackingand connecting them virtually as they movethrough the physical world. NFC can instantly synchronize mobile devices with informationresources, secure access to encrypted Wi-Finetworks, and coördinate physical move-

ments of remote team members to enhancecoöperation and accountability.I hope these themes prove useful as a lens

through which to absorb the articles in Busi-ness Impact this month, and to assess theapplicability of these ideas to your business.

JEFFREY F. RAYPORT SPECIALIZES IN ANALYZING THE IMPLICATIONS OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES. HE IS CHAIRMAN OF MARKETSPACENEXT, A STRATEGIC ADVISORY FIRM; AN OPERATING PART-NER AT CASTANEA PARTNERS; AND A FORMER FACULTY MEMBERAT HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL. CARINE CARMY CONTRIBUTEDRESEARCH TO THIS ARTICLE.

tion in online social environments. UnlikeLinux, an open-source operating system thatdidn’t become popular until corporate third

parties like Red Hat provided enterprisesupport, Drupal grew through collabora-tion among Web users and developers. Itsstrength lies in its simplicity: while it o ersa sophisticated API for developers, no pro-gramming skills are required to create andadminister a basic website. As a result, by 2010 Drupal was running 7.2 million web-sites, including whitehouse.gov. A community supports it, volunteer developers enhance it,and the “collective” uses a heuristics-basedapproach to improve it.

6. Tap the wisdom of a crowd. Think of crowdsourcing as mass-market collaboration.

Crowdspring, an online ad agency, givesusers the ability to spec out design tasks (say,a brand treatment or a logo), post structuredRFPs online, and await “bids” on the work. A simple request can generate dozens of designsubmissions within 24 to 48 hours. Only the

winning submission (if the user selects one)gets paid. That’s talent on demand.

Meanwhile, Threadless, started in 2000,is the paradigmatic example of crowdsourc-

ing on the Web. It sells T-shirts designed by a community of users, who submit 300designs a day; the site’s fans vote for theones they like best, and winning designs earntheir creators $2,000 each. The goal is topost seven new shirt designs a week andsell those designs for three to eight weeks.In 2009, the site generated over $30 mil-lion in revenue.

The contrast between these two sites,however, illustrates an important lesson.Collaboration enabled by networked tech-

nologies works best in knowledge-intensiveand information-based tasks. While Thread-less manages an entire business processfrom design to manufacturing to distribu-tion, Crowdspring does not. Once a “client”has settled on a creative execution, there’sstill the task of making it happen—printingmaterials, creating video or online advertis-ing, placing media.

7. Keep it real. The downside of knowledge

And annual new product releases rose fromve to 31. Now, Intuit markets Brainstormto Fortune 1,000 companies, universities,

and governments.4. Build the 24-hour knowledge factory.

I borrow this phrase from a 2004 researchpaper by two MIT scholars, Amar Gupta andSatwik Seshasai, who observed that manag-ers at businesses with workers in both theUnited States and India once believed thatthe misalignment of time zones was a barrierto collaboration. Today, the reverse is clear,as Gupta and Seshasai were among the rstto see: link enough time zones together, and

you have an organization that never sleeps,

conferring a natural advantage in productdevelopment cycles or service delivery times.

When global collaboration works, whether within a rm or across rms, the results can be impressive. Conversify, for example, is asocial-media marketing agency with prin-cipals based in Alaska, Denver, Boston, andthe U.K. Even for a small organization, thisgeographical distribution makes it easy tomonitor and manage social media aroundthe clock. It also creates a virtuous time warp:one manager remarks, “When we have some-

thing due on Monday, I feel like I have twoMondays in which to do it.” In global enter-prises such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and

Wipro, this kind of approach has becomecommon: project teams linked across threeor four time zones work continuously andmove it forward in perpetual motion.

5. Mandate structure within the socialcacophony. Don’t be lulled into thinking thatsocial media’s conversational metaphorseliminate the needs for structure and pro-tocols. On the contrary, strict guidelines and

de ned terms of engagement become evenmore critical. The application programminginterface (API) is a good metaphor. Want tocollaborate with Google, Facebook, Twitter,

Apple, or RIM? Want to get an app into oneof their app stores? APIs specify structuresand pathways available for collaboration.

The open-source Web managementframework Drupal is another example of howa structure can be set up to enable collabora-




Leaders

How to Best Use

Collaboration ITLimiting collaboration software to small teams and short time periodsworks best, a scholar of “knowledge workers” says.

Online social networks are boom-ing, but companies are still tryingto gure out how their employees

can take advantage of constant connectiv-ity to collaborate without becoming over-

whelmed or distracted.One answer is to ask small groups of

employees to collaborate online for lim-ited periods of time, says Tom Davenport,a professor of information technology andmanagement at Babson College. He spoketo Technology Review ’s chief correspondent,David Talbot, about the latest trends in col-laboration tools.

TR : Collaboration software has beenaround for a long time, but it hasn’talways been very effective. Why?

Davenport: There is a long history of collaboration aids, going back to relatively structured tools—Lotus Notes being therst prominent example. Microsoft Share-point is the most prominent example today.Companies are implementing them all overthe place. Of course, nobody gets excitedabout them because they are seen as very corporate.

Whether or not they are exciting, arethese tools creating ef ciencies and sav-ing companies money?

The fact is that most organizations aren’treally serious enough yet about collaborationto measure it much. They tend to be a lotmore interested in tra c to their websitethan tra c on their collaboration tools site.They typically don’t have any particular focuson who should be collaborating with whom.That means you have to measure everything,

such as overall hits on a collaboration site,or number of users of Sharepoint.

What is the most effective way to use col-laboration software?

People who work on mapping collabo-ration and patterns of interaction betweenpeople have noticed that less is more. His-torically, companies were quite interestedin increasing the amount of collaboration.Now they are interested in targeting andlimiting collaboration because people aregetting overwhelmed. We will probably seea return to the more curated, facilitated col-laboration environments.

Deloitte has found that giving people a

bunch of tools and saying “Go innovate andshare ideas” doesn’t work very well. Lim-iting the duration of a program is critical,

and so is limiting the set of people that itmakes sense to collaborate with.

Why aren’t social networks like Facebook doubling as tools for companies?

People did get excited about these more bottom-up social tools in that they prom-ised a “people’s revolution” in collaboration.I think many companies are uncomfortable with unstructured tools. But they are quitecomfortable with Microsoft [software] andcan say, “We’ve got blogs, social tagging, dis

cussion databases.”

What do you see as the next wave of in-novation in collaboration?

The whole idea of collaboration and socialmedia—but in the context of a work pro-cess—is one that is going to take o . In other

words, you might build a social-networkingtool around a speci c work process [withtools that] keep track of where you are and

your tasks.

C O U R T E S Y O F T O M

D A V E N P O R T

KEEP IT SIMPLE TomDavenport of BabsonCollege says that withcollaboration software,less is more.




Leaders

Salesforce.com jumped into cloudcomputing before the term evenexisted. The company was founded

in 1999 to o er businesses a customer-rela-tionship management (CRM) service thatran online and didn’t require software to beinstalled on employees’ computers. But last

year, Salesforce entered a decidedly more

crowded market: the one for collaborationtools for the workplace.Like other such services, Chatter takes

elements from Facebook and Twitter andputs them into an application that helpsemployees assist each other much more e -ciently than they can by endlessly e-mailingdocuments to each other. The company’schief scientist, JP Rangaswami, explainedto Technology Review ’s deputy editor, Brian

Bergstein, why Salesforce thinks Chatter isunique, and how collaborating in the o cemight become much more like a game—ina good way.

TR : What does Chatter do differently fromthe countless other collaboration toolsthat have existed?

Rangaswami: The challenge was not indesigning a system to collaborate, becauseas you said, there are millions of them. Thechallenge was how to take a collaborationmechanism and associate it with systems of record. Systems of record are the replace-ments for books and ledgers of the rm, andhave to be built with a very high degree of security. But the systems of engagement,the ways that people communicate with

each other, had to be built on diametrically opposed security principles. And you don’treally want all your customer data beinge-mailed around. You wouldn’t want a l istof all your best customers being extractedfrom your system of record and then mailed

by somebody who’s leaving the company.Chatter works securely with Salesforce

systems of record—and it can be made to work securely with others, such as softwarefrom SAP or Siebel. And it is based around

data rather than around messaging.

What does that mean, in practice?

It allows you to follow, in Twitter terms,things in addition to people. I can follow acustomer complaint, I can follow an order,I can follow an invoice, rather than just aperson. I can choose which events I wouldlike to subscribe to. And groups can be cre-ated, to allow project teams to work together.The UI by which the human in the enter-prise interacts with information is a stream—

curated by my own network.

Why does it make sense in a business forinformation to be ltered by someone’snetwork?

People buy from people, people sell topeople. There’s something very social aboutthe engagement process by which any saleis carried out. Because it is a social interac-tion, tools that allow us to reduce the noiseof having separate silos are valuable.

What is an example of the kind of prob-lem that your customers say they needChatter to solve?

“Help me nd the things and people that will help me close the sale: Where is the col-lateral that will help me answer the ques-tion the customer has? Who are the people

who have the skills to be able to do that?”So you can think of it in terms of searchcosts being reduced.

Collaborating throughStreams of InformationJP Rangaswami, chief scientist at Salesforce.com, explains why hiscompany’s new tool for collaboration could pave the way for produc-tive game-like interactions in the of ce.

GAMING THE SYSTEMJP Rangaswami sayscollaboration tools could offer workers the feelof a game. Good collaborators could get pointsor badges to encourage them to keep it up.




Impact Points

If more and more of the work of acompany is done in these informationstreams, then the ways of measuringemployee performance might need to

change, right?

We publish something called Chatterlyt-ics: who’s most likely to comment back andreply within a given time, whose answershave been seen as valuable. Terms like “rela-tionship capital” or “social capital” or “humancapital” start having meaning. We’ve usedthem for 20 years, but without the tools tomeasure them or understand them. It’s what

we’ve learned from the Facebooks, from theTwitters, from the LinkedIns and the like.

I see where you’re going—if people werescored on whether their colleagues sawthem as good collaborators, they wouldbe motivated to keep it up, right?

[People always ask] “If I do this, will itmake my job easier? If I do this, will I getpeer respect? If I do this, will I get recogni-tion?” These sorts of questions are human.

And what we’re now nding is that we couldsee a world where, for this project, you couldsay, “You need these three badges.” [Users

of the social-networking service Foursquareearn badges for doing certain things, suchas visiting a certain bar enough times.]

I am extrapolating, so you understand where it is going, rather than where it istoday. [But] we are already working on many of these measures, and we have groups of people focused on where badges would bemeaningful.

Talking about making this into a gamemight provoke some skepticism frompeople who think that’s a fad, or thatbusiness isn’t a game.

The people who push back and say it ’s afad are the people who still don’t understandhow Wikipedia could come about, who stilldon’t understand the sheer volume of lit-erature that says that in prediction markets,play-money markets appear to have very similar degrees of accuracy as real-money markets.

Google’s Ultra-Real-Time

Messaging Tool Lives OnThe company halted its work on Wave, but aspects of its radicalapproach to communication have been reincarnated for business.By KRISTINA GRIFANTINI

W hen Google Wave launched in2009, the company suggestedthe program was a “new cat-

egory” of communication because it

combined the virtues of e-mail, instantmessaging, and methods for sharing pic-tures, links, and other documents.

Wave went a step beyond IM by lettingpeople see what their message partners were

writing as they typed it. That meant that thepeople on the receiving end of your messages

would see characters appear onscreen even before you had nished formulating a sen-tence. It was a radical approach. I tried Wavemyself and found it distracting to watchpeople type, delete, retype, and misspell

their thoughts. People I had persuaded totry it with me never signed in again. We weren’t alone in our confusion: las t year,Google stopped developing Wave.

And yet, Google Wave lives on—in busi-ness software.

Google allowed other companies toincorporate some of the programmingcode behind Wave, and that’s what Novell,a maker of business software, did for itsnew collaboration tool, Novell Vibe Cloud.The program, which is in beta now and is

due to launch fully this spring with a free version and a paid subscription service for businesses, o ers the real-time “co-editing”function of Wave in an interface similar toGoogle Wave’s. But why would this succeed where Google Wave didn’t?

Wendy Steinle, director of product mar-keting for Novell’s collaborative solutions,says Vibe Cloud has a more speci c purposethan Google Wave did: to help people collab-

orate within a company and between compa-nies. “By being particularly targeted toward

workplaces, it makes a lot more sense,” shesays. “People don’t need to real-time col-

laborate as much for social messaging asthey do brainstorming for business ideas.”

Enterprise programs that only mimicTwitter or Facebook updates don’t giveemployees the tools to develop a shortexchange into a fuller idea or business plan.In contrast, Novell’s Vibe Cloud “is designedso you can start a conversation as a shortmicromessage ... [and] grow that messageinto a full document or strategy,” she says.

Thousands of companies are using the beta version of Novell’s program, Steinle

says. Her own team has used Vibe Cloudand its real-time messaging function formeetings and brainstorming.

Even though that means “your processfor getting work done is de nitely more vis-ible to the people you’re working with,” shesays, overall the function is still quite useful.

“People are much more engaged and pres-ent,” she contends. “If you see notes beingtaken before your eyes, you want to par-ticipate in that.”

Judd Antin, a research scientist at Yahoo

who studies the psychology of online col-laboration, questions whether real-time co-editing is really helpful. “Maybe that harmscollaboration, because you don’t have achance to construct yourself and your sen-tence,” he says. “One of the beautiful thingsabout the ability to hit return [to send yourmessage] is that you get to backtrack andtake out that awful thing that you probably shouldn’t say.”




Leaders

The Psychology of

CollaborationAn IBM researcher examines the limitations of doing all ourcollaborating through software.

In the 1980s, long before the rise of online social networks, Irene Greif helped found the field of computer-

supported coöperative work (CSCW), whichexplores how technology helps people col-

laborate. Today Greif is an IBM fellow, thecompany’s highest technical honor, anddirector of collaborative user experiencein IBM Research. Jodi Slater, who worked

with Greif at Lotus Development after it was bought by IBM in the 1990s and latercofounded the business consultancy Mar-ketspaceNext, recently spoke with Greif forTechnology Review about why some of thehardest collaboration problems have noth-ing to do with technology.

TR: How are today’s collaboration tech-nologies different from earlier ones?

Greif: What got researchers interested instarting this eld [CSCW] was that anthro-pologists went into o ces and started see-ing the kinds of things that break when youautomate too much. Mostly that happened because the automation was online, people were not involved, and personal conversa-tions were eliminated. ... These were cau-tionary tales: “Don’t get too excited aboutautomating, because you could break things.”

What about knowledge management?Why was that not more successful?

Knowledge management focused onasking, “How do we get information outof people’s heads? How can we force themto write it down?” That just didn’t work.Now, social software is drawing people in,and they are contributing information. It ishappening so much more naturally.

How has this played out in IBM?

We star ted by taking ideas that were work ing on the Internet and bringingthem into the company. We wanted to see

whether those ideas would take o natu-rally inside a company. Dogear was exactly that kind of experiment because we were

taking something that had existed in Deli-cious for sharing bookmarks and brought itinside. People had to use their real names,and they could bookmark things inside andoutside the company. For searches on theintranet, people liked what they got fromDogear better than what they got from theregular intranet search that relied primarily on text analytics. Now it is a standard featureand the CIO has put it on our search page.

What is the lesson here for other compa-nies interested in this kind of thing?

If you are a CIO trying to decide whether

to buy a product and want to know whethereverybody will use it, and if you are goingto be measured by whether something you buy starts to be used by everybody, you needto make sure you are measuring the rightusage. Dogear, in particular, is not used by a huge number of people, and it is not clearif it would be better if more people used it,

which is part of the interesting magic of this. People self-select which tools they use.

What qualities will make or break the

next big thing in collaboration?The next important thing will need to

withstand the controls that may be imposedon how it is implemented. For example, itis possible that companies that insist ondoing small pilots of social software willdampen the viral e ect so much that they

will never see the bene t and they won’t buy it. Someday the whole world will havesocial software, but during this whole longphase of evaluation, anyone who is stuckon old styles of evaluation is not going to

see the value.

What should the goal of all these pro-grams be?

I have always believed that collaborationis most meaningful when you are really cre-ating something together and when you aresharing your thoughts before they are n-ished products. If I am only willing to show

you something that is a polished document, you might edit or change it a little, but youare not really doing it with me.

People have to trust each other to do that.It is risky to show people your un nishedthoughts. Technologies for a long time couldlet you do that; people did not always dothat. Social software, to the extent that it ishelping people build trust and be comfort-able with more casual, lightweight commu-nications, could make it possible for moreof our attempts at collaboration to be realcollaboration.

TRUST IS KEYIrene Grief says that for collabo-ration to work, you have to trust people enoughto let them see what you’re working on while it’sstill a work in progress.




Leaders

For proof that workplace collaboration

is a tough problem to solve, checkout the scores of books on the subject. Near the top of that list is The Cul-ture of Collaboration , by Evan Rosen, aSan Francisco-based consultant who beganfocusing on the subject after beginning hiscareer in executive communications.

Rosen says he came into the collabora-tion issue from something of a sidewaysangle. He was trying to help executives get

their message across, but in doing so, he

discovered that they often didn’t agree onthe same message from one o ce to thenext. He realized, the problem wasn’t simply articulating the message, the problem wasa lack of collaboration. And the reason forits absence, he discovered, usually involvedthe culture of the company. American soci-ety, says Rosen, encourages individualismand a star system, which inhibits the very collaboration that he maintains can make

companies more e ective. He explained why to technology journalist Lee Gomes.

TR : What is the main idea underlying yourperspective on collaboration?

Rosen: Collaboration means di erentthings to different people. When somepeople refer to collaboration, they’re talk-ing about technology. And that’s part of theproblem. Companies think that if they intro-duce certain technologies, that they’re col-

laborating. But a central point in my bookis that tools and technologies never createcollaboration. Culture creates collaboration.

That’s a interesting point, but what doyou mean by that, exactly?

Organizational culture stems from ourcollective culture. And our collective culturein the United States is star-oriented. We readand hear about “star athletes,” “star chefs” ...

Collaborating Takes More than Technology A business consultant and author says working together can be atough sell in many companies.

G A B R I E L A H A S B U N

TOOLS AREN’TEVERYTHINGAuthor Evan Rosensays a culture ofcollaboration is abigger deal thansoftware.



Collaboration Tools0 business impact March 2011

Leaders

the list goes on. And it’s a myth. Because allof these so-called stars need help from oth-ers to achieve. Star culture is the antithesis

of “collaborative culture.” In a star culture,the best people supposedly rise to the top ina Darwinian survival-of-the- ttest fashion.Some companies regularly eliminate the

bottom 5 percent of the workforce. They rank them, pitting people against each other.

But there are counterexamples, likeApple. It seems the opposite of every-thing you’re describing—very hierarchical,with people almost fearful of the guy atthe top. Yet it is a huge success.

Well, there are always examples of compa-nies that are successful even though they’recommand-and-control oriented. But thequestion I always ask is, “How much moresuccessful would they be if they were truly collaborative?”

But is that something you can truly ndthe answer to? How would you know?

You can look at examples. Collaborationis about creating value, because if we’re notcreating value, what’s the point? When you

start looking at shaving months o productdevelopment cycles—in everything fromautomobile manufacturing to aerospace toanimation—that is real, measurable value.

And that is what collaboration can deliver.

What empirical evidence is there thatcompanies that collaborate well do betterthan companies that don’t? The exam-ples always seem anecdotal.

Scoring collaboration is something I amcurrently working on. And you’re right, most

of what we are dealing with is anecdotal. But we are starting to put a framework around it.

What would be a quick test someonecould use to determine whether theircompany’s culture was suf ciently col-laborative or not?

If the executives are cloistered in mahog-any-lined o ces, and everybody else is ina cubicle, that’s a clue. But perhaps even

more important would be the recognitionand rewards system of the company. Arethey recognizing and rewarding people for

internally competitive, command-and-con-trol behavior? Or are they recognizing andrewarding people for collaborative behavior?

If this is as clear as you describe, whywouldn’t companies see it for them-selves?

The problem is that for years we have been in a society that has reinforced com-mand-and-control. And that’s the way orga-nizations have been operating: Paying a fewpeople to think, and paying everyone elseto carry out orders.

But we’ve learned that just doesn’t workany more. Now it’s “all hands on deck.” Thereis a realization that we need to come together

to make decisions and solve problems andeven develop products, regardless of level,role, or region.

But what about the approach where astrong leader sets a goal and says, “Let’sall march toward that”?

There needs to be someone at the top who people can look up to as a leader. Butthe approach to leadership doesn’t need to be command-and-control to be e ective.

In fact, when people within an organiza-

tion are able to participate in decisions, acompany can create far greater value.

So where does this anticollaborationethos come from?

We can’t ignore our educational system. When I was in school, collaborating onhomework was called “cheating.” The way

we operate in the university setting, andin a corporate setting, is in many ways anoutgrowth of our education system.

Maybe we need to take another look at

how we’re conditioning people to behavelater in life. Because if everything is beinggraded on a curve, and we are competing

with everyone around us, how are we evergoing to be able to e ectively collaboratein an organization?

Command-and-control might not bepretty, but it gets things done. Couldn’t anoveremphasis on collaboration paralyzean organization?

What paralyzes an organization is when

management compromises value by failingto tap ideas, expertise, and assets. What alsoparalyzes an organization is when requestsfor decisions languish in in-boxes rather thanhashing out issues spontaneously. Paying afew people to think and paying everybody else to carry out orders creates far less valuethan breaking down barriers among silosand enabling people to engage each otherspontaneously.

“When I was in school,collaborating onhomework was called‘cheating.’ Maybe weneed to take a look athow we’re conditioningpeople to behave.”




Leaders

Connect, Communicate,

CollaborateCisco’s productivity software combines social networking with otherforms of communication.

Cisco Systems started out connect-ing computers, but today, connect-ing people is just as important to

the company. It has created collaborationproducts that merge multiple communi-

cation tools, including phone, video, and acorporate-friendly form of social network-ing. Murali Sitaram, the Cisco vice presi-dent who oversees these products, recently spoke with Tom Simonite, Technology

Review ’s IT editor for hardware and software, about why Cisco believes it can boostother companies’ productivity.

TR: Isn’t Cisco a computer network company? Why make social collaborationsoftware?

Sitaram: After [the Internet became] theprotocol for all communications betweencomputers, we did the same for human-to-human interactions: with IP telephony wereduced the cost of voice calls, and enabled

video calling, too. When people can com-municate, they start to collaborate. Our lat-est goal is now to meld in unique, powerful

ways the di erent types of communicationthat we provide to help them do that.

How are you doing that?

With Quad, a product that brings allour communication tools together. It is a Web-based application that allows people within an organization to create pro les,share information through wikis and micro-

blogs, and create a professional social network within your company. It’s a powerfultool for the information transactions youneed to get your job done; for the last 20

years, knowledge workers have had noth-

ing more sophisticated than cc and bcc one-mail to manage how information is shared.

Quad is also integrated with real-timecommunications. When you access a per-son’s pro le, you can send an e-mail or a

microblog message, have an instant-messageconversation, or click to have your phonecall them.

Quad contains elements very similar topersonal social networks like Facebook and Twitter. What do they have to offerthe enterprise?

Facebook and Twitter have perfectedtechniques to lower the cost and barriersto communication. We need that power inthe enterprise, so taking inspiration fromthem is a natural shift.

How does that type of tool have tochange to t into the workplace?

We have to deploy them with policy and

security features to meet the requirementsof the enterprise; we are also connectingthem with real-time, synchronous commu-nication such as voice and video.

What about people who need to collabo-rate with people outside their company?

Already you can include outside contactsin Quad so you can use it to initiate a real-time communication with them. We are also

working on a feature that makes it possibleto create communities in Quad that share

information to external users.I might use that to extend my network

to include my supply chain. Both internaland external users could be in that group, but external people would have access only to the information for that community andnothing else. You can create rich connections

with outsiders but still rely on the security of your information.

Is it possible to measure Quad’s effect?

My group—a few hundred engineers

plus product management and others—hasmoved for most practical purposes away from e-mail to using the Quad. Thanksto that, our e-mail tra c over the last sixmonths has [been] reduced by about 38 per-cent. We also reduced by about 42 percentthe amount of storage we use. Now there’sone place where we can share everything;

we don’t have to store copies of every lein our in-boxes.

Aren’t some people resistant to using so-cial networking-like technology at work?

We are working with about 50 customersusing Quad at this time, and each has a dif-ferent level of acceptance of the technology.People are not going to move away frome-mail en bloc to something new within a year, but we think this shift is going to hap-pen in the next three to four years. I thinkthat today we are at the very peak of e-mailusage; from now on, it will decline. C

I S C O

E-MAIL IS OVER RATEDMurali Sitaram of Ciscosays we’re now at the peak of e-mail usage. Hethinks collaborative tools for such communica-tions will become more prominent, and soon.






Emerged Technologies

SharePoint Tries to Keep UpWhy any new collaboration tool will run up against competitionfrom Microsoft.By MARK SPEL LUN

A lmost all collaboration tools haveone thing in common. One way oranother, they will run up against the

market leader: Microsoft’s SharePoint software, used by more than 100 million peoplearound the world.

SharePoint’s success can be attributed toseveral factors. One, it does a lot: among

other things, it lets employees share doc-uments, search internal les, coördinatetasks, and send each other instant messagesthrough a central portal. Second, customerslike the fact that it works well with other

widely used Microsoft products, such asExchange e-mail and the O ce softwarepackage. Third, Microsoft o ers a basic ver-sion of SharePoint free to companies thatrun servers with Windows software.

SharePoint is also customizable—accord-ing to a 2010 study by the Association forInformation and Image Management, 28percent of SharePoint users add third-party applications to it. Cognizant, an IT con-sulting company whose 100,000 employ-ees exchange information and blog abouttheir work through SharePoint, built its own

version of Twitter, called Cweet , to work with the Microsoft platform. Cognizant’schief information o cer, Sukumar Rajago-pal, says the sta ers who blog perform bet-ter on average and are more engaged withthe company. All these blogs and “cweets”

become part of the company’s searchableknowledge database, accessible by anyonelooking for information. Rajagopal arguesthat such tools “can be used to build collabo-

ration across layers much more e ectively than you currently are able to with tradi-tional communication techniques.”

It’s di cult to imagine another makerof collaboration software replicating allSharePoint’s services. Instead, softwarefrom many startups is designed to workalongside SharePoint rather than replaceit altogether. But competitors still have a bigopportunity in collaborative software that

is hosted remotely, “in the cloud.” O eringsuch services could give them an impor-tant advantage, because one of SharePoint’smajor aws is that it doesn’t store data e -ciently, argues Mark R. Gilbert, a research

vice president at Gartner. That can makethe user experience sluggish. A company can be forced to undertake signi cant IT workor buy extra servers and memory to makesure the program runs smoothly.

“If you don’t have a good-sized IT shop,taking full advantage of a SharePoint server

license can be difficult,” adds ForresterResearch analyst Rob Koplowitz. “Smallerorganizations that have the luxury of starting

with a blank slate are turning to the cloud.”Microsoft’s closest rival, IBM, already hasa cloud o ering with LotusLive Notes, andthree million companies are using onlineapplications o ered by Google.

Microsoft recognizes this threat and has begun o ering a remotely hosted version of SharePoint. Royal Dutch Shell plans to startusing it in April so its employees can collabo-

rate worldwide. Later this year, Microsoft will launch an online package of productsthat has a version of SharePoint built into it.

“The cloud is picking up steam and willexplode this year,” says Jared Spataro, Micro-soft’s director of product management forSharePoint. “A hundred million licenseesfeels like a lot,” he says, “until you realizethat’s only one out of every ve information

workers in the world.”

SHARE AND SHARE ALIKESharePoint is soubiquitous that many competitors, rather thantrying to replace it, work to create software thatcan work alongside it.





Please Update YourStatus at Work Collaboration software from a company called Jive Softwareis challenging products from established rivals such as IBM.By LAURE N COX

Some companies actually want theiremployees to blog, tweet, and updatetheir social-networking pro les at

work—as long as they’re doing i t on cor-porate-purchased software.

Three years ago, the information man-

agement company EMC began encouragingemployees to spend time on internal socialnetworks discussing their extracurricularinterests. “We have people talking aboutphotography, and art, rock climbing—youname it,” says Jamie Pappas, whose titlespeaks volumes: she is manager of enter-prise social-media engagement strategy.

EMC had something in mind beyondconnecting all its motorcycle enthusiasts.

The management wanted to test new “social business software” from Jive Software, acompany that runs online forums and social-networking and collaboration software for businesses.

“The thinking really was that employees

really want to come together around a topic,and they’re worried about saying something wrong if it’s about a [work] project,” Pappassays. “So those social conversations were sortof like icebreakers. It helped people get inthere and then feel comfortable jumpinginto the business conversation.”

When companies get too big, opportuni-ties for collaboration can diminish. Individ-ual employees looking for a colleague with

expertise on a particular topic can struggleto nd the right person.

In hopes of cutting through the noise,Jive o ers a wide-ranging platform for col-laboration, competing with the likes of IBMand Oracle. It o ers applications to connectcolleagues and projects the way Facebook,Twitter, and Web forums connect fan basesand friends. Employees set up pro les, blogs,groups, and Facebook-style “walls.” All thisinteraction happens behind the corporate

rewall but is accessible by internal searchprograms.

At EMC, instead of starting long e-mailthreads, employees can check updates abouta project on a Jive page, search for relevantmaterials, and download the les as they need them. Sales representatives lookingfor insight about a competitor can query the

“competitive community” on EMC’s internalsocial network and get an answer as they

walk to a client meeting, Pappas says.Collaboration tools with origins in the

consumer world have often met with resis-tance from IT departments. But Stowe Boyd,an analyst and advisor to companies build-ing such applications, says business-focusedsocial-networking software is growing fast.Christopher Morace, Jive’s senior vice presi-dent of business development, credits theincreased popularity of Facebook.

When Jive started selling its business software in 2007, some potential customers were wary of adding more tasks to the workday.But now, Morace says, he doesn’t need to

explain that with these tools, a person canrealistically keep track of multiple conver-sations and engage hundreds of contacts.

Jive hopes to become something like aFacebook in business—a widely used plat-form on which many kinds of applicationsare hosted. “When push comes to shove,”Morace says, “when this market becomesreally competitive, we decided we are really good at being the modern platform.”J

VE

LOOSEN UP EMC found that employees weremore likely to jump into the business conversa-tion if they’d already started talking on a relaxedsocial network like Jive.





Yammer Gets Workers Hooked

First, then Woos BossesA free business-focused social network lets employees choose howto collaborate.By LAURE N COX

Some vendors of made-for-businesssocial-network software woo com-panies from the top down. Jive and

IBM’s Lotus Connections, for example, try to sell management on all-encompassing

tools such as blogs, wikis, or Facebook-esque pro le pages that work well with soft-

ware already in place at most corporations.However, the startup Yammer took a

bottom-up approach with its collabora-tion service: it tries to entice rank-and- leemployees rst and bosses later.

Yammer lets people make microblog postsin a format similar to Twitter or Facebookupdates; the users can also message eachother, create online groups of colleagues,

and upload documents. Any person with acompany’s e-mail address can join Yammerfree. The rst person within a company to

join can quickly set up a network for theentire company; as coworkers join, Yammer

automatically includes them in that com-pany’s network. No involvement from theIT or HR departments is necessary.

This isn’t to say management is excluded.Eventually, “executives get involved and they start posting,” says David Sacks, Yammer’sCEO and founder. But Sacks lets the software-not a sales associate—convince man-agement that social networks can streamlinecommunications and make people moreproductive. He also argues that this model

spares companies from the risk of invest-ing in expensive software that might notget used much by employees.

Stowe Boyd, an analyst and advisor tocompanies building social technologies, says

Yammer’s method of getting into a company is “revolutionary, subversive.” “Companiesturn around and nd out that they’ve got500 people using Yammer, and they wantto take control of it,” he says.

For the IT department to gain control, acompany has to buy a premium version of

Yammer. This version also has such featuresas the ability to link Yammer with employeecontact lists and corporate software. Com-

panies generally pay $5 per employee permonth for the premium version.

Two million employees at more than100,000 companies have used Yammer;Sacks says between 15 and 20 percent of those workers are using premium versions.

The join-as-you will structure of Yammer worked well for AAA’s collection of morethan 50 regional driving clubs across theUnited States. Some clubs use it for daily operations and others only for occasionalcommunications, says Janie Graziani, public

relations manager of new media and technol-ogy at AAA. And the employees who werealready reliant on AAA’s intranet systemdidn’t have to change their ways. “Yammeris just a ‘use this if it’s useful to you and your

work’ thing,” Graziani says. “We haven’t toldpeople to use it instead of your e-mail.”

David Coleman, founder of CollaborativeStrategies, an industry analysis and advisory services rm says the software will have toshow that it increases a company’s pro ts if it’s going to keep selling itself. “Collabora-

tion itself just for the bene t of interactingreally doesn’t have a huge amount of value,”says Coleman. “What it really needs to dois sell the outcomes or the goals that comeout of the collaboration.”

NO IT DEPARTMENT REQUIRE DEmployeesdon’t need of cial permission from the companyto start collaborating on Yammer. They can setup their own accounts and create a network foranyone employed by the company. Y

A M M E R





Most company intranets are lit-tle better than corporate news-letters: static, lifeless, boring.

“You know what the most visited corporateintranet page is?” asks Eugene Lee, CEOof Socialtext. “The cafeteria lunch menu.”

Socialtext, a nine-year-old company basedin Palo Alto, California, aims to make thecorporate intranet sexy again. In the processit is changing the way silo-bound corporatecitizens collaborate.

Enterprise social technologies often doonly a few things well, although many arerapidly adding features and integrating withlarger applications to try to be everythingto everyone.

Employees use popular services like Yam-mer and Socialcast—often on their own ini-tiative—for Twitter-style microbloggingand Facebook-like social networking, forinstance. Socialtext wraps that kind of “activ-ity stream” and social network together witha host of others features, including blogs,

wikis, document-collaboration workspaces,and tags that help people nd informationand experts on a topic.

A feature called Socialtext Signals allowsemployees to post, in 1,000 characters orless, status updates and messages to every-one at the company, to a particular workinggroup, or to an individual.

The stream of posts works like Facebook’sNews Feed, occupying a position front and

center on an employee’s dashboard-likehome page. Each post, or signal, is part of a threaded conversation in which employ-ees can respond to comments, add links tocontent, and tag information.

Rather than being made up of randomposts about what someone ate or read, mostSocialtext entries are created automatically as a result of collaboration with other people.These “in the ow of work” updates happen

Not Your

Father’sIntranet Socialtext is fueling corporatecollaboration one tweet at a time.By BRIT TANY SAU SER

FORGET ABOUT LUNCH Eugene Lee, the CEO of Socialtext, says the most popular feature of acompany’s intranet is usually the cafeteria lunch menu. His company aims to make the intranet usefulagain: a tool for status updates and threaded conversations related to getting things done.





While many companies see the value of

collaboration tools in breaking down infor-mational and functional silos, they have trou- ble determining which tools will work bestfor their organization and employees. Many sta members want the freedom to use thetools they like best with little oversight fromthe central IT department, but that oftenresults in a hodgepodge of unsupported apps.

An even bigger issue is that most populartools do little more than encourage peopleto blab about work. Socialtext is insteadhelping people get work done. It showcases

productivity.In 2010, Socialtext launched an initiativecalled Socialtext Connect, which encouragesthird-party developers to use its applicationprogramming interface (API) to seamlessly pull enterprise-level updates into the activ-ity stream.

Companies can build software agentsthat listen for certain events. When an ordercloses in Salesforce.com or a document is

with hospitals in many small rural towns.Chakkarapani says that since the organiza-tion launched Socialtext in August 2010,

communication and collaboration amongfar- ung employees and managers haveimproved signi cantly.

With the new platform, team membershave been able to get quicker updates onprojects, share ideas more easily, and worktogether more productively.

Many other organizations are rushingto add such social tools as tweets, blogs,and status updates as well. A 2010 survey from InsightExpress found that 77 percentof global businesses expected to increase

their investment in collaboration tools overthe next year, with India and China beingthe most enthusiastic adopters.

whenever someone does something produc-tive in Socialtext that others in the company should know about—comments on a blog

post, responds to a question, edits a wikipage, or tags a pro le. The idea is that peo-ple demonstrate their value to the company not by what they say about themselves but by what they do.

In addition to traditional informationlike a person’s title, location, and depart-ment, tags can display work-related expe-rience, areas of expertise, working-groupa liations, and interests. Employees can tageach other’s Socialtext pro les with infor-mation as well.

The software isn’t staging a popularity contest, however. It’s all about productiv-ity: no “friending” at work. Socialtext hasadopted Twitter’s approach, in which userschoose to follow other users. The service

works through a Web browser, a desktopapplication, and mobile devices, and it can be hosted on the cloud or in a company’sdata center.

Already, Socialtext customers like Getty Images and the American Hospital Asso-ciation (AHA) have replaced their intranet

home pages with a Socialtext dashboard.Before the AHA implemented Socialtext,employees found it hard to collaborate witheach other on issues of health-care reform,says Karthikeyan Chakkarapani, directorof technology solutions and operations. Hesays the company was using up to 15 soft-

ware-as-a-service applications to facilitatecollaboration.

Before deciding on Socialtext, Chakkara-pani looked at a half-dozen other similarapplications, including Yammer, Jive Soft-

ware, and Salesforce.com Chatter.“The problem is no one had an open archi-tecture,” he says. “With Socialtext, we wereable to integrate it into our other enterpriseapplications and build a one-stop platformthat people can easily access.”

The features that AHA employees usemost frequently include the activity streamand wikis. The organization has more than500 employees in all 50 states, and it works

The Socialtext software isn’t about staging apopularity contest. Instead, it’s all aboutproductivity: no “friending” at work.

edited in SharePoint, the activity streamcan display that fact.

In many ways, it is analogous to the way

Facebook’s News Feed can pull informa-tion from third-party sites, says Lee. Forexample, a Socialtext update might read,

“John updated the latest CRM record for the Acme Corporation account.” When clickedon, that could take someone to a Salesforce.com record to learn more.

Under the message in Socialtext, col-leagues might have a conversation about

what steps they must take to win thataccount.

“If you’re a CRM or ERP vendor, it has

been fashionable to add social features onto your application, such as with Salesforce.com’s Chatter,” says Lee. “The problem is,

if companies use those applications as their

approach to adopting social software, they will end up having a social network for theirsales team and their app, another for theirnance team and their app, and anotherfor their product team, and so on.

All of these applications will be walledo from one another, and a company won’trealize very much cross-functional col-laboration that transforms the business.Socialtext is instead a layer that spans theenterprise.”

Socialtext aims to unearth and share the

valuable information that often lies buriedinside static intranets—inventory levels fall-ing low or customer complaints bubblingup overnight.

“Two years ago I would have spent a lot of money and resources to implement socialtechnologies within our organization,” saysChakkarapani. But now, he says, enterprise-and budget-friendly tools are easily withinreach.





A Facebook Cofounder Tackles

Workplace CollaborationDustin Moskovitz says lessons he learned while building the socialnetwork will apply in the world of collaboration software.By TOM SIMO NITE

Q uitting Harvard to build a sitethat rapidly grew to dominatethe Web was undoubtedly excit-

ing, stimulating, and rewarding, but Face-

book cofounder Dustin Moskovitz also usesanother word: frustrating.

As Facebook’s chief technology o cerand then vice president for engineering, hehelped equip the network to coördinate every part of your life, from planning events toreading text messages. In the process, herealized that no such tool exists to coördi-nate the ow of work in the modern o ce.

“We had something like 25 di erent toolsfor managing di erent types of data, likecalendars and expense reports and more,

that were all reinventing the wheel,” hesays. “They all used the same techniques but didn’t connect.”

Now he hopes to solve that problem.Moskovitz left Facebook in late 2008 and before long started a collaboration-softwarecompany called Asana, which has raised $9million in venture funding.

The startup recently revealed its plans,showing o Web software that helps peoplekeep track of joint projects and update oneanother on their progress.

The software’s design shows signs of itsFacebook heritage. Once a project has beencreated in Asana, users can “follow” it tosee a Facebook-style news feed of updatesor comments made by people involved. Ito ers rapid access to the history of a proj-ect and its current status.

Comments also update in real time,enabling speedy exchange of ideas andinformation. That beats communicating

over e-mail or IM, because informationis kept tied to the project and doesn’t getseparated from its context and lost in clut-tered in-boxes.

Moskovitz says lessons learned in thecompetitive world of consumer websites

will make Asana stand out from previous workplace software. “The principal valueof our team is that we’re a consumer team; we’re used to releasing early and often andmoving fast and are willing to experiment,”he says. “We’re aiming to create a productthat sells itself because it’s a joy to use.”

That product seeks to ll a gap in thecurrent market for collaboration software,

he says: “There are tools that are really goodfor sharing already, like Google Docs ande-mail, but they’re extremely bad at struc-turing information about tasks and updates.”On the ip side, he adds, tools like MicrosoftProject provide plenty of structure but arepoor for sharing. “Our chief mission is tond a better balance between the two,” hesays. “We have structure and more exibility.”

A NEW FOCUS Facebook cofounder DustinMoskovitz realized that he could create softwarethat would do for your of ce life what Facebookdoes for your social life.

Some 100 organizations use Asana today,in an invitation-only beta trial set to becomemore open later in the year. So far those orga-nizations have been small startups that aretesting Asana against more established com-petitors such as Basecamp, Pivotal Tracker,

or Salesforce.com’s Chatter.Future battles will be fought in another world: that of large-scale enterprises, whichtypically buy software in large contractorders from suppliers such as Microsoftor Cisco.

Asana’s strategy there will be to providehooks to let its software connect with toolsalready in use, something that Moskovitzsays his engineers have yet to focus on. “We’llcreate ways to import data and even sync

with certain software in use today,” he says.

Perhaps Asana’s most ambitious goal,though, is for workplace software to becomeas addictive as a must-have online app.Moskovitz says that the tangible bene tsof well-designed workplace software makethat possible.

“Many people today are being held back because they are so busy doing work about work,” he says. “Anything that makes youmore e ective will advance your career.”

“Many people are be-ing held back becausethey are so busy doingwork about work. Any-thing that makes youmore effective willadvance your career.”




New Business Models

Collaborating by Connecting WebsitesHow an API can help companies market themselvesand reach new customers.By CARI NE C ARMY

One of the most powerful collabora-tion tools available is not a pieceof software for employees to use

on their PCs. Nor is it an enterprise socialnetwork used to break down o ce silos.It is a technology that’s simple, open, andoften free: the application programminginterface (API).

The API is a set of speci cations for shar-ing data between Internet sites. It lets Webdevelopers access elements of an applicationor online “platform,” such as Google Maps orFacebook pro les, and integrate them intotheir own sites or applications. Those pro-

viding APIs can scale their products in anautomated fashion, and those implementing

APIs can add features to their sites withouthaving to build them from scratch.

A well-known example is Facebook Con-nect, which is Facebook’s open API. Cityse-arch, among many other sites, has tappedthis API to let its users log in with theirFacebook accounts and share their pro leinformation with a network of friends. Usersare typically unaware of the technical aspectsof the API; all they know is that the tech-

nology makes a company’s services readily available to them on more platforms.Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures

has said an open API sped the rise of Twit-ter (in which his rm is an investor): “By launching with an almost totally open plat-form and a dead simple API, Twitter gotthousands of developers to build productsthat had ‘Twitter inside.’ Those developersand their products pulled Twitter into the

market.” Meanwhile, Twitter offers sup-port to developers who use its API. Thistype of structured collaboration can help

companies crowdsource several corporatefunctions, including marketing, businessdevelopment, and innovation. Here’s how:

Marketing. A successful API can support brand building, spreading awareness andenabling companies to reach users whereverthey are. Net ix’s API, for example, has beenimplemented at so many companies thatusers can access its services on more than200 devices. Promoting the API, a strat-egy aligned with the company’s shift away from DVDs and toward streaming video,

helped it retain market leadership even asmajor competitors, like Amazon Instant,entered the fray.

Business development. Big companiesuse self-serve APIs as a streamlined way to respond to market demand. That’s whatGoogle is doing with its family of map APIsthat developers can use for everything fromeveryday applications (such as Weatherbug)to obscure interests (charting roadkill acrossthe United States).

Product innovation. The API can act as

a catalyst for making products more use-ful. Ford drivers, for example, can use thecars’ Sync system to access popular serviceslike the streaming music app Pandora fromthe road, thanks to work done not by Ford but by external programmers through thesystem’s API.

APIs do carry risks. A successful API canhelp a company grow so fast its technol-ogy can’t keep up: Twitter, which has saidits API drives 75 percent of its tra c, hasstruggled with service outages.

On the other side, sites that plug intosomeone else’s API risk losing access to somedata about customers—information thatis often the core of a company’s businessmodel. But the bene ts remain compellingenough to suggest that this type of business-to-business collaboration will continue toaccelerate rapidly.

CARINE CARMY IS A SENIO R CONSULTANT AT THE STRATEGIC SORY FIRM MARKETSPACENEXT. T

E C H N O L O G Y R E V I E W




New Business Models

Crowds of Workers,

on DemandCompanies are turning to crowdsourcing middlemen tomake “good” crowds.By KRISTINA GRIFANTINI

In 2009, Kraft Foods wanted a catchy name for its new version of Vegemite,a yeast-based spread popular in Aus-

tralia. Instead of hiring a branding agency,

the company decided to crowdsource thetask. Kraft asked people in Australia tosubmit and vote on potential names forthe new product. After 48,000 entrantsmade suggestions, the winning name was

“iSnack2.0.” When the company announcedit, bloggers and fans ridiculed it and thecompany retracted it a few days later. Notonly was the name scorned, but it had also been trademarked previously.

The incident illustrates the perils for busi-nesses that try to take advantage of the sup-

posed wisdom of the crowd. It’s no mystery why the idea appeals: instead of hiring oneperson for a task, a business can pay littleor nothing to divide it up among thousands,often getting the work done faster to boot.But while companies have had some successdivvying up simple jobs like categorizingproducts, harnessing the crowd for morecomplicated tasks has proved di cult.

Now, third-party companies have sprungup to act as liaisons between businesses anddi use groups of potential contributors.

These companies say they can attract spe-cialized crowds to help solve a wide variety of problems in such diverse industries aschemicals, design, and the Web. “It turnsout that when you have tasks that requirecreativity and planning at a higher level, theoverhead involved and the need for consis-tency across the whole task makes [crowd-sourcing] very di cult,” says Judd Antin,a research scientist at Yahoo who studies

online collaboration. “We’re at the beginningof understanding how to take advantage of the e orts of many of thousands of people.”

To start o , one needs the right crowd.

Threadless, a company often cited as a suc-cessful example of crowdsourcing, sellsT-shirts online, and asks people to submitideas and vote on designs that they like and

would buy. The Threadless sta assesseseach shirt for “social score” (the number of tweets about a design, or the number of times

a company’s project and farms it out. Inparticular, Trada gets these people to helpcompanies create and improve ad campaigns

on search engines. A tourism company, forexample, would bid on keyword combina-tions (like “Hawaii vacation”) and write shorttext for an ad. When a Web surfer types inthat keyword, the company’s ad comes upalongside the search results, and if the adis clicked on, the company pays the searchengine the amount it bid. But comparingresults and making the changes can belaborious. Trada turns those tasks over toa crowd of workers. If a business aims tospend $1 a click and a Trada worker creates

a successful campaign for 80 cents a click,Trada and the workers keep the di erence.

Trada has more than 1,500 people avail-able for such work; each ad campaign canrequire ve to 20 contributors. After pass-ing a basic certi cation test, a worker hasto accomplish three out of ve goals for acustomer before gaining access to more cam-paigns. One such worker is Je Yin, who wasa laid-o climate scientist when a friendrecommended that he sign up with Trada in2009. He’s working on about 30 campaigns

and makes about $4,000 a month working30 hours a week. “It’s a way I can learn aboutInternet business and get great experiencein pay-per-click advertising,” says Yin.

Other crowdsourcing providers createcustom-made crowds. One such service provider is called Chaordix. “Crowd recruitmentshouldn’t be underestimated,” says Randy Corke, the company’s vice president of busi-ness development. Some companies mighthave lists of potential participants in news-letter lists or customer loyalty programs. “If

they don’t, then we work with them to deter-mine the characteristics of people we shouldinvite into the crowd,” Corke says. Peoplepossessing a certain skill or knowledge, forexample, or a particular demographic might be useful, but Corke says Chaordix also looksfor diversity—geographic or otherwise. “Gen-erally speaking with crowdsourcing,” he says,

“the more diverse the crowd, the strongerthe results.”

people logged in to Facebook have clickedthat they “like” the item) and picks a naldesign to print. The power of Threadless

lies in its crowd: 1.5 million voting membershave submitted over 300,000 T-shirt designs.But few companies have such an engaged

community. That’s where crowdsourcingcompanies like CrowdSpring, CrowdFlower,

Victors & Spoils, and InnoCentive come in:they o er crowds for speci c tasks.

Trada, founded two and a half years ago,straddles the line between traditional out-sourcing and crowdsourcing: it takes on

“Crowd recruitmentshouldn’t be underesti-

mated. Generallyspeaking with crowd-sourcing, the morediverse the crowd, thestronger the results.”




Case Studies

To Understand How

Social Software Works,IBM Experiments on Itself How IBM fosters internal experiments with social software.By ERIC A NA ONE

A bout 400,000 people work at IBM.They’re scattered in o ces all over

the world. To help all these dispa-rate people work together, the company has been conducting large-scale internalexperiments with social software.

But what started as ad hoc experimenta-tion has become a focused e ort driven by the company’s senior management, reachingalmost every one of the company’s employees.

As far back as 1997, IBM built an Intranetdirectory in an e ort to help employees ndothers with the skills and experience they

were looking for.

For several years after that, employeesinformally built applications on top of thatinfrastructure. While many of the tools they

built were helpful, they often didn’t havethe technical support they needed to really improve work at the company, says JohnRooney, who heads the Technology Innova-tion Team in IBM’s o ce of the CIO. “Proj-ects might be running on a server undersomeone’s desk,” he says.

Five years ago, IBM started the Tech-nology Adoption Program (TAP) to facili-

tate employees’ software experiments. Thecompany created a website with a catalogue, where employees could nd projects to try out, and supplemented it with infrastructureto host and develop the projects.

TAP hosts a variety of projects, from early tests of planned commercial products totools and plug-ins designed by employeesin their spare time.

“Many things enter TAP without a speci c

agenda,” Rooney says. IBM then looks at howpeople embrace and adopt the projects, see-ing them through a life cycle that can lead

to broader deployment if early indicatorssuggest value.For example, Rooney says, many compa-

nies struggle with nding an e cient way for employees to share les. When peopleuse e-mail for this purpose, it’s often hardto tell which version of a le is the mostrecent, and duplicate les are stored all overthe place. That makes it hard to keep trackof a project, and even makes it possible for

important work to get lost in the shu e.For years, IBM’s IT office had a file-

sharing service in place, but hardly anyone

used it. An employee reconceived the service, adding better social features. The new version caught on throughout the company and eventually led to a product that IBMo ers to its customers.

Measuring the success of social tools can be tricky, since many of these technologiesserve intangible goals, such as making ageographically separated team feel morecohesive. It’s almost impossible to measuresuch things accurately.

However, TAP tracks ratings and adop-

tion levels for its technologies. Employeesof IBM’s research arm also conduct studieson tools shared through TAP to quantify their e ect. The company says that LotusConnections, which includes many featuresthat originated in TAP, is the fastest-growingproduct in IBM’s history.

In its various social experiments, IBMhas “sucked in virtually all of the conceptsfrom the Web and Enterprise 2.0 worlds,”explains Michael Coté, an industry analyst with RedMonk. “I like to think of what they

have as your own version of the Web, for behind the rewall.” At IBM, employees are participating in

what Rooney calls “a truly social community.”The participation numbers are impressive.

About 358,000 employees are registeredfor IBM’s internal version of Connections—e ectively 90 percent of the workforce.

More than 124,000 employees are reg-istered to be early adopters through TAPand have committed to making a biggerinvestment in developing new internal

social technologies.He adds that the company further sup-ports social experiments by using the toolsfor companywide events known as “jams,”

which are conversations between seniormanagement and employees. By havingsenior management initiate conversationthrough social technology, Rooney says, “wesend a really important signal that we valuea certain type of interaction.” I B

M

A TRULY SOCIAL COMMU NITYIBM has essen-tially created its own version of the Web, butbehind a rewall. Some 90 percent of the IBMworkforce is registered.




Case Studies

How a Reorganization Spurred the Need for ‘The Wiki’A publishing company nds that social software cuts down on theduplication of work.By LAURE N COX

Five years ago, United Business Media, which owns a number of trade pub-lications and hosts trade shows,

reorganized itself to improve the onlinepresence of its properties. The 100-year-old company broke its three divisions intoa federation of 15 businesses, each cateringto a specialized audience. UBM says themove helped it increase the percentage of its revenue that comes from online adver-

tising, but it also created a new problem.The company had dismantled the structurethat had facilitated communication among6,000 employees around the world.

“In our previous organization structure, what happened was that if there was apiece of know-how that needed to be car-ried outside of a division, it needed to travelup before it could get out,” says JenniferDuvalier, UBM’s director of people and

culture. That wouldn’t work now that thecompany was “as at as it was geographi-cally diverse,” she adds.

So in 2008, UBM launched an experi-ment that it now calls “the wiki.” Using toolsfrom Jive Software, UBM’s employees cancreate a searchable online pro le that liststheir expertise and past projects. Employ-ees can create blogs, groups dedicated to atopic, and project pages where members can

update status reports and upload documents. As more employees joined the wiki, people

learned that other divisions were working onproblems similar to theirs, even if the audi-ences they served were completely di erent.

“We discovered, almost embarrassingly, wehad many, many people in di erent divi-sions trying similar mobile projects,” says TedHopton, manager of UBM’s wiki community.

Now, Hopton says, employees can buildon work being done in other divisions andshare tips quickly. “They’ll ask, ‘Hey, I see

you did this with your mobile app—how did you do this? Can I use your code?’ ”Since most of the divisions within UBM

host websites that do not compete with oneanother for viewers, employees have sharedinsights about search engine optimizationor discussions on successful strategies forputting articles behind a pay wall. “This isn’t

just Facebook for the enterprise,” Hoptonsays. “We’re really wrestling with the fun-damental aspects of our business.”

Rebecca Ray, vice president and manag-

ing director of human capital at the nonpro tthink tank the Conference Board, says thatcollaborative tools within businesses become

“self-policing.” Good ideas continue to gener-ate interest. Bad ideas lose steam. “Peopleonly come back to anything if they thinkthat there’s content that’s relevant,” she says.

By that measure, UBM’s e ort has been asuccess. Duvalier says 73 percent of employ-ees use the wiki at least once a month.

SHARING THE WEALTHVia searchable onlinepro les, employees at United Business Mediawere able to see who else at the company mightbe working on similar projects, and then take

advantage of each other’s expertise.




Case Studies

Managing the Chaos of

a Thousand VoicesHow the Drupal community is scaling up its collaborative vision.By ERI CA NAONE

W hitehouse.gov, along with mil-lions of other sites on the Web,is based on Drupal—free, open-

source software, built by a global commu-

nity of volunteers, that enables users to build websites even if they have little to noprogramming skill. The project has grownsteadily since Dries Buytaert founded it in2001, and more than a thousand peopleparticipated in creating Drupal 7, which

was released in January. As the commu-nity gears up for work on Drupal 8, it is

working to preserve an environment that will remain friendly to collaboration nowthat the project has outgrown the informalsystems that have served it to date.

“Initially, I was able to understand all thecode,” Buytaert says. “Now, that’s not neces-sarily possible for one person.” So community leaders are putting formal systems in placethat they hope will make Drupal feel moreaccessible to new participants while givingpotential users a clear sense of the project’sdirection. Part of the challenge facing Drupalis that it must present a united front to themany companies and institutions that haveentrusted their websites to the software—

Warner Brothers Records, Penn State Uni-

versity, AOL, and Symantec, among others.Though Buytaert maintains a leading role,it’s always been a priority for him to allowothers to have a say in Drupal’s direction.

“We’re working with volunteers, and it doesn’t work to be top-down with them,” he says.

At first, Buytaer t could establi sh thisenvironment in conversation with otherdevelopers. But to make this collaborativeenvironment more formal, Drupal is switch-

ing to a new version-control system calledGit—itself based on free, open-source software—that he believes will encourage the values he supports.

A version-control system like Git helpsimpose order on the strange and miraculousundertaking that is an open-source proj-ect, in which enormous pieces of softwareare often built and maintained at very highquality by a loose-knit group of volunteerdevelopers working on what they feel like

working on during their spare time. People write code and debate its merits, and ulti-

mately project leaders o cially release codethat has passed the community’s test.

Most important for Drupal, Buytaert says,

Git will allow small groups of developersto work on bigger chunks of the software.Buytaert can delegate management of thesegroups to leaders who can create minia-ture collaborative environments within theirareas of specialization. “This allows me toscale,” he says, referring to the impossibility of managing it all himself. “It also helps thecommunity scale, since it will give newbiesa clearer sense of where to start.”

Git also gives clear credit to those whodeveloped sections of code, which Buytaert

says is very important. “Recognition is thecurrency in our project,” he says; givingpeople a sense of ownership over the workthey’ve done is the way to create “passion-ate contributors.”

“We always used to do this,” he adds, “butit was sort of informal.”

The environment that the community is working to preserve has so far proved suc-

GROWTH STRATEGY At a Drupal conference in Chicago, Dries Buytaert, the founder of the opensource project, outlined changes that he hopes will preserve a sense of collaboration as the commu-nity around the software continues to grow. C

O U R T E S Y O F D R I E S B U Y T A E R T




Case Studies

W hen SAP, the large businesssoftware provider, needs tocomplete a project quickly, it

takes advantage of its global reach, along with collaboration tools that make it easierthan ever for people in disparate areas to work together.

The approach is called “follow the sun.” As the name implies, it’s an around-the-clock operation. At the end of the workday in Germany, where SAP is headquartered,software developers and other project expertshand o work to counterparts in California.Eight hours later, the California teams handthe work over to teams in Asia. It’s not idealfor every situation—such as when SAP isdeveloping an application for use in onemarket. But it can be useful when time isshort and SAP has to develop software that

works all over the world.SAP put a follow-the-sun plan into use when it tried to help customers deal with theJapanese triple crisis of earthquake, tsunami,and nuclear disaster. Big companies thatuse customized SAP software to run theiroperations needed SAP to quickly developnew applications to help them deal withthe temporary loss of key suppliers. Someof SAPs clients depend on Japanese semi-conductor plants, known as fabs, that makethe customized chips for smart phones and

other electronics. When those fabs were shutdown, their customers needed to recon g-ure their supply chains to account for newshipping routes from alternate plants.

That brings a cascade of challenges—navi-gating the customs laws at di erent ports,avoiding ports with big backlogs, and adapt-ing to other crises around the world, such asclashes in the Middle East that threaten oilsupplies and shipping lanes. All this has to

be taken into account when SAP modi esits supply-chain software.

To do this, it followed the sun. Europeandevelopers can make use of local experts,such as people who know the vagaries of European ports. They might know, for exam-ple, that it will take 20 days to clear customs

at one port but just two at another, and they can get the supply-chain software to takethat into account. Other experts might havethe latest on how events in the Middle Eastcould a ect the Suez Canal, potentially forc-ing ships to take longer routes.

The German team passes o the projectto colleagues in North America and Asia;each in turn can make use of local experts.“The response time, and having people withthe right knowledge, is absolutely critical,”says Oliver Bussman, SAP’s chief informa-

tion o cer. Handing o from one country to another also lets the company test theproduct on the y, to make sure it works wellfor people in di erent cultures and settings.

Follow the sun has become an increasingly popular approach, says Tom Eid, a research vice president at Gartner. One twist at SAPis that the company uses its own software,known as Streamwork, to manage the pro-cess. When developers and others workingon the project get to the end of their workday,they can connect with their colleagues using

the system, which lets them hold videocon-ferences and exchange instant messages.Streamwork also tracks updates to avoid

the confusion that can come from multiplepeople working on software with a millionlines of code, and to make it possible toretreat to an earlier version. It tracks deci-sions made, including who made them and why, to help a new team get up to speed on what happened in the previous shift.

cessful at bringing in new developers andengaging them.

Designer Jen Simmons, who is now a

senior developer with the Chicago Webdevelopment rm Palantir.net, started out asa Drupal user. Two years ago, she went to aconference to learn how to use the software

better and was surprised by the extent to which the community of Drupal program-mers manages itself.

Simmons says that community lead-ers such as Angie Byron, who helps main-tain Drupal 7, created an atmosphere thatinspired her to get more involved. Sheheard them saying they needed more of the

“themes” that can change the look and feelof a Drupal site, and she knew that she was

well suited to work on the problem. At rst,she wondered how to get picked—but, sheeventually realized, that wasn’t how Drupal

worked. “There is no picking,” she says. “Justdo the work. When you’re done, if we like it,

we’ll put it in.” In practice, this means thatany member of the community is allowedto make suggestions. In the end, a smallnumber of volunteers are empowered by Buytaert to add to the core body of code,

and they do so when a consensus emerges. What Simmons designed would eventu-ally become Bartik, the default theme forDrupal 7. Until the day it was o cially addedto Drupal, she says, she didn’t know for sureif her e ort would succeed.

Simmons’s experience matches research-ers’ observations of how open-source proj-ects manage collaboration. Projects put outinformation about what needs to be doneand volunteers step up and say they canhelp, says anthropologist Diana Harrelson,

a user-experience researcher and designerfor the Web hosting company The Planet.Collaboration in open-source projects “isnot a top-down or a bottom-up approachso much as it is coming in from all sides,”she says. “You’re working with peers, men-tors, and mentees who all feel they havesomething to contribute and want to con-tribute in any way they can. Otherwise they

wouldn’t be there.”

Making Smart Hando sSAP’s “follow the sun” approach speeds software development bylinking teams in Europe, the U.S., and Asia.By KEVI N BU LLIS




Infographic

0

325

650

975

1,300

2009

Total software spending (millions)

Year2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

Source: Gartner (November 2010)

Social Software Spending Expected to Rise

Social Networks a Coming

Trend at Work Companies are spending more on social and collaboration software,as new tools compete for workers’ attention.By LAURE N COX

Industry research shows that the mar-ket for collaboration software used by corporations—a type of software com-

monly called Enterprise 2.0 technology—

is growing, despite the sluggish economy.Gartner, an information technology indus-try analyst group, began tracking revenuegrowth of social business software in 2009.Gartner predicts the market for enterprise

social software technologies will continueto grow from $664 million in 2010 to $1.3 billion in 2014.

As the popularity of social collabora-

tion software continues to grow, companies will need to sort through all their variouschoices and attempt to nd which amongall these available tools will work best fortheir speci c needs.



Infographics

A 2010 Gartner survey of 416 U.S.-basedIT professionals shows that e-mail remainsthe favored communication tool in the o ce.

However, these same IT professionals are betting that collaboration tools will burrowa niche in daily business operations.

Forrester Research, in a survey of 934North American and European decisionmakers, found that many professionalsplanned to buy “team workplaces,” or toolsthat share data, documents, and calendarsamong workers online, while allowing usersto track changes to shared content.

Professionals also planned to implementmore Web 2.0 tools—wikis and microblogs,for example—in business. However, IT pro-fessionals were less likely to want “uni ed

communications,” which allow employeesto check each other’s availability, in realtime, on shared calendars, and then choose between voice, video, e-mail, or instant mes-saging to initiate conversations.

Gartner’s analysis shows that North America accounted for 60 to 65 percent of enterprise social business software revenues.Europe and Asia made up 25 percent and10 t ti l

E-mail

Blogs

Source: Gartner (July 2010)

Current importance(1 to 7; 1 means not important at all; 7 means extremely important)

0 2.00 4.00

E-mail Still Trumps Other Communication Tools at Work

6.00 8.00

Web feeds

Social tagging and bookmarking

Wikis

Social networking tools

Desktop video conferencing

Expertise location services

Instant messaging

Simple end-user process

Team workspaces

Web conferencing

Group calendars or scheduling

Team workspaces 46% 26%

Communication Tools Compete for IT Dollars

Hosted e-mail

New investment

Forrsights Software Survey, Q4 2010

Implemented, not expanded

On-premises e-mail

Room-based video conferencing

Instant messaging

Web conferencing 31% 42%

30% 35%

29%

29% 55%

16% 12%

33%

Unied communications 32% 10%

Desktop video conferencing 33% 18%

Web 2.0 tools 42% 17%

Documents

4.4.-March11_BusinessImpact