Intelligence Among Us

I have been doing a lot of reading and thinking, along with many others,  about the relative merit of  taxonomies and folksonomies in the corporate environment.  Would you derive more value by spending effort creating a detailed taxonomy for your information environment or would you be better off letting the users categorize content by tagging that content thereby creating a folksonomy?  Or perhaps a hybrid solution where a shared vocabulary is used to as the basis of your content tagging effort.

Since I am currently working with MOSS 2007 forgive me if I use some MOSS specific terms throughout this post.

Obviously there are benefits and drawbacks to both and their relative merits can be dictated by the situation.  I wouldn’t personally want to be perusing for medical information on heart medication and be mislead into thinking a laxative fell into that category because someone thought that would be funny – although I’m certainly not above seeing the humour there.

First let’s understand some relevant terms.  It would be a terrible irony if we didn’t define these terms considering the topic of this post.   Or would it?

Taxonomy: is the practice of classifying things.  The Duey Decimal system comes to mind  In the context of this article it is the creation of meta-data structures to organize and classify content.  The structure is often hierarchical and really represents an attempt to create a shared vocabulary.  I work in a manufacturing company and and example of a sample taxonomy can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy_of_manufacturing_processes

Folksonomy: A non-hierarchical collection of user generated terms used to describe content.  Think tag cloud.  The word is a portmanteau of “folk” and “taxonomy.  Sorry – I found that lovely French word while researching this post and felt like I had to include it.

Precision: In the context of document retrieval, precision is the percentage of retrieved documents that are relevant to the search.  It’s a measure of exactness.

Recall: The number of relevant documents that were returned in a search versus the amount that should have been returned.

Semantics: the study of meaning.  Or in other words, there may be a semantic gap between your perception and your boss’ intentions when  he tells you that as a manager this place could run just fine without you.

Metadata – data about data.  Or in other words, descriptive data about specific content (author, file size, owner etc.) 

Here is a quick table illustrating providing an overview of taxonomies and folksonomies.  Credit goes to Mark Baartse from useyourweb.com for the information: http://www.useyourweb.com/blog/?p=62

There is a very interesting article below that describes the semantic gap between expert curators & laypeople in describing and categorizing artwork.   http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/8/arts/artsspecial/28social.html?_r=2&oref=slogin.  I think in a decentralized, global organization like my current employer that this situation illustrates perfectly the difficulties in implementing a comprehensive taxonomy.

Consider the situations many organizations find themselves in.  A global organization working with numerous languages and cultures composed of numerous functional areas and levels that is sharing information with customers and suppliers.   Add in a decentralized operating structure along with a sprinkle of rather ad-hoc document management practices and the challenges of implementing a taxonomy that will add any value start to become quite clear.   There is a lot of leg-work do to organizationally prior to even considering a technology solution.  

“Can we all agree on what a “part” is?  What about a customer? What about an HR policy?  Most of the time we can’t agree where to go for lunch.   And hey!  All our ERP solutions are implemented differently anyway.  Shouldn’t we spend 10 years doing that prior to doing this? And that guy from Iowa is a jerk anyway so there is no way I’m working with him. I’m hungry…about that lunch…”

Incrementally implementing a simple taxonomy that can leverage the enterprise search features of MOSS is straightforward and requires agreement of a smaller group of people.  

In scenarios like this I have started to lean much more towards the use of folksonomies.  It’s far simpler to implement, content editors have been open to the idea that they can “tag” things and it shows up in a cool tag cloud on the home page.   Plus it seems very trendy and Web 2.0.

In fact I have to include an image of one of the first that we implemented.  It figures that the most prominent word would be Die.  Just my luck.

 Obviously this is fraught with the typical perils of user generated tagging but in our situation the content authors are reasonably well-trained.  They are not that likely to imput something malicious.  They might input something that makes no sense to someone else but that’s part of the process.  It’s a hell of a lot easier to modify a tag than it is to make a change to your taxonomy.  In fact, and this is very important, I see a real opportunity for a folksonomy to drive a more structured effort at creating a taxonomy over time.  It will provide us with a glimpse into how the people that use the content perceive that same content.

The important thing to remember is that this approach provides content consumers with a new mechanism for finding the information that they are looking for.  It is complimentary to Enterprise Search. There are numerous free tagging solutions for MOSS 2007 available at codeplex and it will be included in SharePoint 2010 out of the box.

The major limitation I see with this approach is the lackof a semi-structured contextual shared vocabulary.  I’m referring to a way to provide content creators with contextual tagging suggestions based on the content they are trying to describe.   If you take a look at my short post regarding OpenCalais you’ll get an idea of what I am referring to: http://www.intelligenceamong.us/?p=350. 

When I think of a hybrid solution this is what I am referring to and the potential power of the Semantic Web or Web 3.0 or whatever we’ll be calling it in a few years.     Imagine if content creators were able to filter their content through an engine or services that looked at the contents and was able to determine relationships, people, events, facts etc. about the content and return suggestions that made sense.   The instances of incoherent or irrelevant tags would drop significantly.  Based on what I have seen with OpenCalais, we are going to look at creating a prototype that integrates with their service to assist content creators with creating a reasonable folksonomy.

In summary, taxonomies and folksonomies are complimentary to one another and will faciliate your understanding of your information from a variety of perspectives.  Nothing is static and gathering as much information as organically as possible will assist the evolution of the classification system that you choose.  Adding semantic capabilities to your content tagging effort can make your folksonomy even more relevant.  Good luck.

I wanted to talk briefly about a specific project and how it might be implemented while keeping the governance considerations mentioned in the last 2 posts top of mind.

In my view, if we had an engaged Business Strategy team the strategic instructions would look something like this.  Developing people is a critical activity to ensure the future success of our company.  Training is a crucial component of developing people and it’s imperative that we find a more cost effective way to deliver this training.  We must also continue to leverage our investment in SharePoint and continue to work towards making it our primary platform for delivering rich media and interactivity.

However, really how it went was more like:  It would be cool if we could have streaming video for stuff like eLearning.   These comments and conversations were casual but repeated and were initiated prior to the kick-off of the governance project.

We were keenly aware of a few things:

1. People Development and Training is a strategically important area for our company
2. Costs of delivering training must be reduced – especially considering the current economic climate
3. We have invested heavily in SharePoint as both a communication,collaboration and application platform and need to continue exploit that investment
4. There has been an expressed desire to slowly start introducing Enterprise 2.0 ideas and capabilities to the organization.
   1. Our executives have been blogging and slowly introducing more supporting media to their posts
   2. The next step will almost certainly be executive podcasting
   3. Allowing for ranking and commenting on content is a simple way to increase the interactivity of the portal and generate more feedback.

As the Manager of Global Business Solutions I had my team download and install the SharePoint PKS on our SharePoint development environment.  Configuration and testing took a few weeks and as soon as it got to a reasonably demonstratable state we assembled our Technology team and a SharePoint Business Analyst from the People Development and Training department (the functional owners of the portal).

We spent a few days putting detailed documentation together on what it would take to implement the PKS in production based on the information we had (which was very little).  Our objective at this point was to think through the possible implications but to also stress to the Business Strategy team that this was a significant undertaking.  The documentation covered the following main areas:

1. Business Opportunity and Objectives
2. Prerequisites
3. Infrastructure Requirements
4. Policy and Guideline Requirements
5. Estimated Project Costs (this was a WAG)
6. Ongoing Costs
7. Resource Requirements
8. Risks
9. Potential Success Criteria and KPIs

Point 2 relating to prerequisites are where the governance piece comes into play.  Whilst the governance development is well underway, the teams are currently working on their action items – some of which are related to training, acceptable use, SLAs, disaster recovery etc.  We stridently insisted that these must be approved and in place before introducing more complexity to our SharePoint implementation.

We demonstrated the software to the Business Strategy team members and reviewed the documentation with them.  It is currently in their hands and we’ll see in the near future what the decision is.  As I have stated previously, this is the approach we have decided to take.  Proactivity on the part of the Technical Strategy team to look forward and initiate projects that we believe have business merit and bring those to the BST for approval.

For part 1 of these article please go here.

I want to take a moment to finish part 2 of this article.  It’s a simple concept but often overlooked for a variety of reasons.  The main idea is that whatever value you are trying to deliver through SharePoint will be so much more successful if it is part of an effective business process.  Wikipedia defines a business process as: “A business process or business method collection of related, structured activities or tasks that produce a specific service or product (serve a particular goal) for a particular customer or customers.”

In our organization, defining and improving business processes is often taken as, “These geeks in IT are just trying to give us a bunch of homework to do so they don’t have to do anything themselves.”

An example came up the other day regarding Cost Savings.  In these turbulent economic times it goes without saying that most organizations are focused heavily on finding efficiencies throughout their company.  So, in my world that means – “We need a SharePoint site to track cost savings.”  Let’s not even delve into the idea of whether SharePoint is the right solution upon which to build this solution at the moment.  After discussion with a non-IT SharePoint “expert” it was boiled down to the fact they didn’t need a site, they needed a list.

The users were sold that this was the ticket to successfully tracking cost savings and off they went.  To date their have been 4 cost savings ideas entered – all by the guy that owns the list and all over a month ago.  About the level of “success” that could be expected.

I got involved shortly before they went live in order to have a fresh set of eyes look at the situation.  The idea was that this was going to be a spot that people would flock to over time to share their cost savings ideas for the benefit of the company.  I told them flat out that as it stood this was guaranteed to fail and they hadn’t given it near enough thought.  They took it like champs.

If the situation listed below sounds familiar or this image looks something like your current SharePoint implementation please read on:

http://www.intelligenceamong.us/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/sharepointstructure2.jpg

1. IT installs SharePoint
2. IT plays around with SharePoint and decides it truly is sweet and starts telling people about it. IT really though, knows nothing about the implications of what they are doing.
3. A few users start using it and things tick along “nicely” for a while.
4. They start talking about it to others and it becomes like that Susan Boyle video on YouTube.
5. Then….an executive sees it and decides that this is the answer to all our prayers your world is now significantly different.
6. Once someone realizes that things are well and truly screwed up a hasty meeting is called to talk about governance.
7. The question now is….what are we going to do about it??

Don’t despair.  It can be fixed and yes it’ll be a lot more time consuming and expensive than had you done it right in the first place – but come on.  Where is the fun in that?

The first step to doing it is getting agreement that it actually needs to be done in the first place.  After a prolonged period of staring into the cold dead eyes of people that could not be less interested the following questions may arise:

1. Who cares if IT backs up 200 gigs of data they don’t need?
2. Doesn’t it work fine now?
3. How much is this going to cost and how long is it going to take?
4. Why did you let it get this screwed up in the first place?

These are all semi-legitimate questions but there are some much more important questions to focus on:

1. What is the business risk of not having any idea who is responsible for the content on half these sites?
2. With more than 400 SharePoint security groups how can we realistically know who has access to what?  What is the potential risk?
3. What kind of information is currently being stored on our portal? Do we know?
4. How much time is spent on an ongoing basis on calls to the Help Desk to answer questions related to this debacle?
5. Is it a value-add to the organization to have 5 sites focused on the same basic operational requirements with redundant data, different users, different owners?

So we all agree that the current situation is not sustainable and we decide that we ARE going to slay this beast once and for all.  So let’s get started!  …  ….  That sound you hear is in fact the sound of crickets.

Baseline It

The first thing you need to do is understand what you currently have to work with.  This means an understanding the hierarchy of every single site collection on your portal.  I personally like the visual approach.  There are tools out there that can help but I’m a fan of Visio for this for a few reasons.  The first is that going through it manually is helpful to me to understand and remember some of the thinking that took place for why things are currently structured as they are.  The second is that the physical and mental anguish that is caused by doing it is an excellent incentive for being more proactive from now on. It’s also an excellent opportunity to weed out the sites and content that are obviously obsolete

The next step is to figure out who actually owns the sites/content.  There are tools available to do this but I always find it advantageous to use these types of opportunities to build and strengthen relationships.

Then comes security.  This is just not fun at all.  You need to truly understand what SharePoint, AD or whatever groups are being used throughout the portal, who is in them, what they have access to.  You also need to understand which ones are not being used.  A strategy around security will come later.

What do we do?

So now that you know what you’ve got what does it mean?  It actually means pretty much nothing unless you can put things into a relevant context – like the operational structure of your business.  So for example, part of your business might be an initiative to focus on global business process standards.  You currently have sites for these types of activities under finance, purchasing, IT etc. & across site collections.  This might be fine but it might make no sense in your organization.  Business processes might be related to financial reporting or how we build a new building.  Is there an executive responsible for the overall standards initiative?  Is there a common language related to these standards?  Is the content public?  These are the types of questions that need to be answered before you can really move forward.

This kind of conversation should take place on a regular basis, preferably people with some actual skin in the game.  Business needs and priorities change all the time and your SharePoint implementation must evolve in tandem – not 4 years afterward – or never.

Do 1 first

Remember that a SharePoint implementation is a journey.  But you don’t, and in fact can’t, tackle this all at once.  So focus on an area that is strategically important to your organization and do it right.  Use those lessons on the others going forward.

Contact the executive/manager responsible for the initiative and explain to them the current state of affairs and the business reasons for undertaking this project.   Before he or she gets the chance to tell you that this is the stupidest idea they have ever had the misfortune of hearing, you need to be able to cough up real data to explain the current state of affairs.  Such as:

1. You currently have 6 separate groups of people focused on standards.  They are using SharePoint and have no idea what the other is doing.
2. There is 50 megabytes of standards data that has been uploaded and it’s extremely difficult to find if you don’t know where to look.
3. 4 of the sites have different versions of the same documents on them
4. If someone moves departments you are going to have 500 documents to change the permissions on individually.  Then explain just how fun and what a value-added activity that is.

It’s important to be able to sell the value of moving forward as well.  Search is always a good one.  Telling someone that you can work with them to understand their initiative and one of the outcomes is that everyone that wants to find the information they need will be able to do it the first time, every time  (a little hyperbole never hurts).

Understand What You’ve Got

Once there is agreement on prioritization of focus you need to gather the stakeholders in the room and truly understand what you are dealing with.  What are people trying to accomplish, what are they supposed to be trying to accomplish, and what are they actually accomplishing?  This is requirements analysis 101 with the caveat that people are going to have some an emotional stake in what they have done.  The last thing they want to hear is some dude tell them that what they have been working on basically sucks.

This involves an assessment of the sites, structure and content as it currently exists.  It also involves understanding the business processes that are driving the need for the sites(s).  If your company is anything like the ones I have worked for no such documentation will exist.  It’s important as well not to lose focus on the task at hand when you are having these conversations.  If you get into wonderfully deep philosophical discussions about how great things could be and all the things that are possible you will resemble Yoda by the time this project completes.

You also need to understand the content, what purpose it serves, how much there is, where is located and why. I won’t delve too deeply in the ideas of taxonomy and information architecture here as there is tons of material on the web that can provide guidance.  Suffice it to say you want to get your new local heroes to think about and understand the language of their business so you can teach SharePoint what it is.

What is the security situation like?    How is content secured? Is it at the site level, list level or the document level?  Are groups managed in SharePoint, Active Directory, Outlook or somewhere else?

Rolling Up Our Sleeves

Well, there is no time to start like the present.  I fully realize this is a drastic oversimplification but my intention is too simple to provide a broad framework for how you might go about a task like this.

Look for more in an upcoming post…

Click here for Part 2.

One of the insights I share with people that are implementing SharePoint and/or an Enterprise Social Computing strategy is that just because you build it does not mean that they are coming. Your people are used to working, communicating and collaborating in specific ways and there needs to be a compelling reason for them to change. In my experience, an important aspect of the human condition is that to varying degrees people are motivated by naked self-interest. Myself? Guilty as charged. How does an organization overcome the “So What” factor when launching their new portal platform that will have a “transformative impact on how we do business?” I will now pause so you can collectively yawn.

To drive the success of an initiative or initiatives like this an organization needs to ask themselves a few very important questions:

1. What are the problems we are trying to solve.  Sounds simple but losing focus on that simple questions will lead you down a path of misery and that flushing sound is your EBIT going down the toilet.
2. What are the business processes, across functional areas, that will support this initiative?
3. What are the motivators that will get people to change their behaviour?

Today I’ll focus on “The Problem” and will cover the others in future posts.

What is the problem?

Let’s first discuss some examples of what are NOT problems

• “We need an intranet” is not a problem.
• “We need a spot where people can collaborate” is not a problem
• “We should do this because our competitors are probably doing it” is not a problem
• “Those geeks in IT installed this stupid thing 2 years ago and since we’re stuck with it now we might as well do something with it”  is a problem but is unrelated to the topic at hand.
• “We just signed an EA with Microsoft which will allow us to legitimately use the functionality we’ve been using illegally up until now” is also an unrelated problem.

Here are some problems (obviously simplified in the interest of dealing with my short attention span)

• We have lost 10 million dollars in new business to our competitors by not having a standardized quoting process.
• We are getting sued 4 times a month because different versions of our ice cream subsidization policy are floating around throughout the enterprise.
• Our Active Directory contains 1500 unique roles throughout the organization.  We need a standardized list in order to support our Succession Planning strategy.
• Training a new hire in the Purchasing department currently takes 2 months and 60 hours of mentoring by a current employee

Problems and the resultant objectives have to be measurable or else you’ll never have any idea if you have achieved success.   There are a lot of examples on-line about creating effective problem statements so I won’t delve into it any further.

The main point I want to make is spend time upfront defining what the problem you are actually trying to solve is – and do not lose focus on it.  Do NOT let consultants sell you on how great things could be if you just also did X, Y and Z.  Base your requirements and objectives on the problem you are trying to solve.

Being a part of a large, global manufacturing company that is at the cusp of embracing the wonderful world of Enterprise 2.0 is an interesting place to be.  There is a strong desire by a few top executives to jump on the bandwagon – although they are not exactly clear why at this point. I am a believer in the potential of ESC but also wary about how and why to implement some of these technologies and potentially radical changes to an organizations culture. I’ve taken a few minutes and identified some of the focus areas that make sense if you are going to take a stab at this whole ESC thing.

One thing I highly recommend is to not overpromise about the transformative effects of ESC and how it will do everything from mitigating the risk of retiring boomers to providing a culture that Generation Z (or whatever the hell they are called at the moment) will feel instantly at home in. Start a pilot with a narrow focus, a defined timeline and measurable objectives – and take it from there.

Below I’ve listed some of the ideas that an organization might want to consider when embarking on the ESC journey. I’ve detailed some approaches to increasing and managing the level of user involvement in your network.

1. Governance
a. Clearly published codes of content, IT acceptable use policies etc.  If you are going to throw the doors wide-open people need to be very clear on what they can and can’t do. Things that would get you canned will get you canned if you do them on the companies social network.

2. Profiles
a. Encourage everyone to update their profiles including their picture.
b. Figure out what data you have available in your corporate Active Directory (or whatever you use) and define standards throughout the organization. I won’t even bother telling you how many distinct roles and departments are defined in ours.

3. Enterprise Search
a. Be very cautious of encouraging the generation of unstructured content when no plan is in place for managing our structured content.
b. Consistently working together to identify the language of your company across all functional areas – in SharePoint terms this is related to Content Typing but for it to really work we need to review it portal-wide.  From a Robot to an HR policy, it’s important that they are defined as consistently as possible across the organization
c. Tune the search on an ongoing basis by :
i. Reviewing the most commonly used search terms
ii. Tuning the relevancy of search results
iii. Grouping like terms.  If someone types in training then they are likely looking for content on the PDT site.
iv. Semantic search tuning.  If someone types in “Die” they are more likely looking for Die Standards then someone’s blog post about his goldfish dying.

4. Tagging
User generated tagging for content uploaded into the system.  This facilitates search in a very organic way.  Allowing tagging is a simple way to allow users to interact with your system in a way that can enhance the experience for all users

5. Content Rating
A mechanism for users to rate content on the system.  Another simple way to encourage user participation and weed out what content really sucks on your social network.

6. Hall of Fame
a. I love this idea as it helps personalize the participants in your network and publicizes the local heroes. A publicly visible page that shows:
i. The user with the most page hits across the portal
ii. The user who has uploaded the most content (although this may or may not be a good thing)
iii. The user with the most blog comments
iv. The user with the highest rated content
v. Most “-pedia” entries

7. “Insert Company Here” – pedia. This is simple in concept and potentially simple in execution. The value of this is that it brings together the key information that might normally be dispersed all over the place, into one location. Feel free to name is something other than a name ending in “pedia” which is getting about as tired as attaching “gate” to the end of every scandal.

8. Expert Search
a. Create a profile property called Area of Expertise
b. Create a custom search called Expert Search that will search that profile information to find the right person.
c. This will encourage the non-deadbeats to step up and identify themselves, thereby making their talents more accessible to the organization.

9. Reward System for encouraging participation
a. Of course we all know that money talks but so does public recognition of a job well done

I find once a few key people get the Enterprise 2.0 bug and read all the content on the web about changing demographics, retaining new and younger talent they lose clarity on where a more immediate impact can be had.  I have been guilty of this myself and want to share some thoughts on the subject.

First of all, I am a huge proponent of bringing Web 2.0 behind the firewall.  I think it has a trememdous amount of potential to democratize an organization and give people a way to have a voice and contribute to a unified effort.  Blogs, wikis, tags, folksonomies etc. are all great ideas and definitely have their place.  But attempting to implement them without first understanding the language of your organization is a mistake.

Firstly a discussion of structured vs unstructured data is in order.  I like this excerpt:

“We all know that structured data is boring and useless; while unstructured data is sexy and chock full of value. Well, only up to a point, Lord Copper. Genuinely unstructured data can be a real nuisance – imagine extracting the return address from an unstructured letter, without letterhead and any of the formatting usually applied to letters. A letter may be thought of as unstructured data, but most business letters are, in fact, highly-structured.”

I consider structured data to be information that can be easily described, has a defined container to store it and is easily searchable.  The problem is that the vast majority of business interactions take place in an unstructured environment: email, IM, RSS etc.

I saw an excellent example somewhere where someone used the example of New York City.   In a structured scenario New York could be described with a latitude and longitude, a type of City, possibly a parent State and Country attribute etc.  In an unstructured scenario New York could be referring to the city or state, the Yankees, Rangers, Jets, New York Stock Exchange etc.  Gleaning the context and intent from unstructured data is much more difficult.

I’m going to analogize in the context of MOSS 2007 but the same principles apply regardless of the technology platform.  I’ll use the example of an HR department who finds out the IT has implemented SharePoint (I’ll discuss why this is a mistake in a later post) and believes that this is the silver bullet for getting people to collaborate and share documents with each other.  The HR lead sits with IT and runs through a vague set of requirements which ends up with a few document libraries in SharePoint that grow over time to become complex enough that internal customers find it too tedious and over time revert to the previous ways of doing things.

Unfortunately the question that is usually asked is, “What content would you like to share?”.   The questions that should be asked are:

1. Who are your target audience(s)?
2. What business processes support the interactions with those audiences?
3. What is the language of HR?  In other words – what is a policy, an employment standard, leave of absence , vacation etc. 

This then leads to going through the process of identifying metadata for each type of content.  It also will allow for the idendification of standard templates and workflows.  Having this data well-thought through is the foundation of an effective enterprise search strategy.

So, instead of a customer meadering aimlessly through a semi-structured repository they are able to interact and search based on the language of the business. Without going through this process you will exacerbate the problems you currently have with your enterprise data.  In fact, if the adoption rate of the portal is near expectations it will accelerate the mayhem.  

There is a growing suite of vendors that have offerings on the market for integrating unstructured data into your business intelligence and analytics landscape.  I submit again, that if you can’t manage structured data and your business intelligence capabilities are limited you will be striking a Faustian bargain by attempting to engage a partner or implement a solution that focuses on unstructured data.

Here are some of the Enterprise 2.0 Blogs I enjoy reading:

http://enterprise2blog.com/
http://www.enterprise2dot0.com/blog/
http://www.enterpriseweb2.com/
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/

The democratization of an organization is a change frought with uncertainty and fear.  We might now we need to do this “social networking” thing because we thing that’s what others are doing but we don’t have a clue to how to go about it.  If the perception of control is given up overwho can post what information the notion of dramatically increased risk is a hard one to stomach.

We keep hearing about the profound demographic shift that will soon be upon us couple with the fact that the generation coming up to replace them is “wired” and work in a completely new, unstructured, unbounded way.  How can we find the balance between mitigating the risk of these people retiring while creating a work environment that the best and brightest want to be a part of?

Tough question.

First of all I’m not that convinced that this new generation of non-conformists will lead an overnight shift that breaks down organizational hierarchies and turns top down organizations into bottom up democracies.  This is partially due to my experience in a large global manufacturing company that prides itself on being progressive and an excellent place to work…which it is.  I’ve been pushing the power of the idea of social networking for a few years and while there is some traction there is a long way to go.  I’m not convinced people have the same social networking expectations inside the firewall as outside.  Personal life is typically more unstructured than professional life and people know and expect the difference.

Also – if we unleash power of social networking what do we do with the information?  Tags, communities, meta-data – how do we mine it for our competitive advantage?  More thoughts on this in an upcoming post.

We must remember that the tools of social networking are based on technology.  The culture and rate of change of an organization is driven primarily from the top.  These are the same people that will be retiring in a few years and either don’t understand or don’t give a hoot about social networking.   In order to be effective at articulating the value of this change its imperative that we first deeply understand our core business and secondly are coherent enough to develop a strategy around tying the benefits of social networking to the achievement of business objectives. 

Which means the first step is hiring smart, articulate, technology-savvy, enthusiastic people to help your business succeed over time.  But I guess we have always known that…

Tim O’Reilly is interviewing her right now.  There is far too much politics interwoven in this conversation but there are some interesting insights on new media versus old media.  Thoughts about how the internet is self-correcting in the sense that if a blogger makes an error it will be pointed out in moments versus traditional media who may issue a small correction the following day.

Having said that it’s clear to me that I am in the heartland of liberalism in the U.S.  Lots of McCain, Palin and Bush bashing, Obama worshipping and global warming regurgitation.  I won’t bother with adding my commentary but I’m sure why this conference is being used as a bully pulpit.  Regardless is always interesting to hear the opinions of others