Social Bookmarking

Enterprise COBOL Applications Meet Web 2.0 - Social Software

jim wilde — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 16:37:35 +0000

Some 75% of the world's businesses data is still processed in Cobol.

JP Rangaswami, on his blog, confused of calcutta, has an insightful discussion, "Musing about enterprise information and flow. ...doesn't everyone in the blogosphere know about ping servers, search engines, aggregators, ad servers, data miners, ad servers and text scrapers? What's so instructive about spam blogs? And surely everybody knows about social bookmarking, about linking, and about making comments?

The instructiveness for me comes in the word I left out. Corporations. Enterprises.

In the 21st Century, the web is two-way; as Doc Searls often says, it's writeable. So, if we take these ideas into the enterprise, build enterprise applications around the web, what are the analogies? Should there be any analogies? Should enterprises be using exactly the same tools as their customers? Why not?"

Here's one idea.

COBOL Meets Web 2.0?

From CW (Computer World), "Confessions of a Cobol programmer".

Some 75% of the world's businesses data is still processed in Cobol, and about 90% of all financial transactions are in Cobol, according to Arunn Ramadoss, head of the academic connections program at Micro Focus International PLC, which provides software to help modernize Cobol applications.

Because of the massive installed base, it would be too expensive to try to replace all that code, he says. Instead, many companies are looking for ways to integrate Cobol with newer applications."

Don't laugh. I cut my teeth on COBOL at a time when IT was DP. I designed and wrote cics/cobol/IMS/DB2 code for dozens of mainframe applications. I even used Micro Focus with both, Telon and APS/PC - code generators. I'd love to have an opportunity to mashup a web 2.0 - social application with a COBOL one.

Any takers? What would the app do? Any ideas on consumer IT mixing it up with corporate IT? I have a couple of ideas around to-do lists with task, calendar, and event management.

Tags:

social informatin management

COBOL

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Web 2.0 website development

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Open Source CMS

Business Development Ideas

Learning Social Information Management

jim wilde — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 19:39:45 +0000

How-to video on del.icio.us and social bookmarking.

I've been using del.icio.us (social bookmarking site) for the last three years to bookmark and share what I find interesting on the net. Also, I use it as my primary search tool. Google/Yahoo are great for the generic stuff but for the meaningful stuff I use del.icio.us. Why? Easy, most of the bookmarks to web pages are intelligently filtered, noted, and tagged. Plus, I can find and make connections with others.

Social Bookmarking is one of the easiest tools for users to adopt. It only takes a few people to build up an incredibly rich library of links, tags, notes and intersections.

Although, the mainstream doesn't think so.

"Discovering versus teaching principles of social information management" by Jon Udell, is part of a discussion on why del.icio.us has not yet made it to the mainstream.

Jon, "In response to Josh Catone's observation that del.icio.us has failed to go mainstream, Richard Ziade offers three hypotheses:

Nobody really needs a way to centrally store their bookmarks
Most people don't understand what del.icio.us does
People don't feel compelled to share del.icio.us with others

The winning explanation, I am sure, is #2. Nobody understands what del.icio.us does. I am constantly explaining the nature and value of its social information management capabilities."

Here's a how-to video on del.icio.us and social bookmarking.

Tags:

social informatin management

SIM

Social Media:

Social Bookmarking

Web 2.0 website development

web design website development

Social Bookmarking video

jim wilde — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 12:19:13 +0000

I've been using del.icio.us for the last three years as my primary search tool. Google/Yahool are great for the generic stuff but for the meaningful stuff I use del.icio.us. Why? Easy, most of the bookmarks to web pages are intelligently filtered, noted, and tagged.

Hey, would you put crappy music on your ipod?

Social Bookmarking is one of the easiest tools for users to adopt. It only takes a few people to build up an incredibly rich library.

Try out our demo bookmarking/voting here.

Tags:

sharing

wisdom of crowds

enterprise mashups

Creative Collaboration - "We-think"

jim wilde — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 15:17:14 +0000

There's a new online book from Charles Leadbeater about creative collaboration. I snagged a couple of paragraphs from his site/blog because it jibes with what we've been yaking about, less eloquently, here, here, and here for the last three plus years. "People want to be players not just spectators, part of the action, not on the sidelines. "

Of course, even to this day and with so much being written about social network software, what many organizations are still failing to understand is that they can achieve similar benfits. FWIW - The process is really simple and cheap to start a pilot project.

Enjoy.

"We-think"

"Google is on the verge [google paid $1.65 billion] bidding £1bn for Youtube, a business little more than a year old. Wikipedia continues to draw more traffic than much more established media brands, employing hundreds more people. Open source programmes such as Linux insistently chip away at corporate providers of proprietary software. Immersive multi user computer games, such as Second Life, which depend on high levels of user participation and creativity are booming. Craigslist a self help approach to searching for jobs and other useful stuff is eating into the ad revenues of newspapers. Youth magazines such as Smash Hit have been overwhelmed by the rise of social networking sites such as MySpace and Bebo. What is going on?

"We-think, an exploration of and experiment in collaborative creativity.

"The basic argument is very simple. Most creativity is ollaborative. It combines different views, disciplines and insights in new ways. The opportunities for creative collaboration are expanding the whole time. The number of people who could be participants in these creative conversations is going up largely thanks to the communications technologies that now give voice to many more people and make it easier for them to connect. As a result we are developing new ways to be innovative and creative at mass scale. We can be organised without having an organisation. People can combine their ideas and skills without a hierarchy to coordinate their activities. Many of the ingredients of these forms of self-organised creative collaboration are not new - peer review for example has been around a long time in academia. But what is striking about Wikipedia, Linux, Second Life, Youtube and many more is the way they take familiar ingredients and combine them to allow people to collaborate creatively at mass scale."

I love this stuff. "We can be organizaed without an organization."

Thanks to D. Weinberger for the link.

Tags:

open innovation

participatory culture

social web applications

Social Media:

community software applications

collaborative software

web design website development

Your job, km, and other people

jim wilde — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 14:38:18 +0000

Knowledge management on the job.

One of the most thoughtful bloggers, Dave Pollard, on knowledge managemt (km) and adaptive learning has an interesting post. Here's an abbreviated version but do check out his full post. FWIW Dave's blog is loaded with great stuff on KM, so don't stop with he latest post.

"Embracing Complexity in Your Job".

"But even if I were to ask the internal and external 'customers' of my client what their information and networking and related technology needs were, they wouldn't know. It's the nature of complex environments that understanding of the 'problem' and potential solutions co-emerge from the exploration, discovery and learning process."

As a services provider, we almost always assume the problems customers face are well understood. As Dave sez, "...they wouldn't know." However, as we identify one problem and demostrate a solution, other problems/solutions "co-emerge."

Dave...

"Here's the methodology I'm trying out on the new [km] project:

Identify the Customer:
Determine who the internal and external 'customers' are -- how they can
reasonably be segmented.
Research & Observe: Study the status quo to understand what is really happening, what the real
processes and workarounds are...
Converse:Have lots of iterative discussions with different customer segments to clarify your understanding of what is happening and why.
Define and Articulate the Needs & 'Problems':Some of the emergent needs and problems will be personal, and you may be able to solve many of these just by observing, conversing, and providing the individual with your ideas and the benefit of your experience.
Imagine Ways of Addressing These Needs and Problems: Now you have reached the real
starting point: Not preconceptions and solutions looking for problems, but qualified, articulated needs and problems with no obvious solutions (if the solutions were obvious, someone would have done them already).
Create a Future State Vision If Your Imagined Solutions Were Implemented:Tell a compelling story of how things could/would happen if the solutions you imagined in step 5 were implemented.
Experiment and Prototype:Start small -- your imagined solutions will never be perfect, and small-scale experiments and prototypes will allow you to refine the solution before spending all the resources on an imperfect solution.
Scale Up: Expand the pilot to all users who share the need or share and appreciate the problem."

This becomes a real problem for some of our clients, "...suppose you follow this methodology and discover (a) there are a lot of fledgling, disorganized, self-identified communities of practice and
communities of interest in (and extending beyond) the organization that need some enabling knowledge-sharing, context-building, sense-making and connectivity technology and processes to self-organize and function."

The question becomes how much access to "enabling knowledge" to give these communities, especially if they are outside of the organization?

Tags:

km2

sharing

rich internet applications

gated social networks

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"The 12 Different Ways for Companies to Innovate"

jim wilde — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 22:33:21 +0000

These 12 ideas on innovatation are a must read for business development managers.

"The 12 Different Ways for Companies to Innovate" from MIT Sloan by Mohanbir Sawhney, Robert C. Wolcott and Inigo Arroniz.

"...many companies have a mistakenly narrow view of it. They might see innovation as synonymous with new product development or traditional research and development. But such myopia can lead to the systematic erosion of competitive advantage. As a result, companies in a given industry can come to resemble one another over time. In actuality, business innovation is far broader in scope than product or technological innovation. In fact, a company can innovate along any of 12 different dimensions with respect to its:

offerings,
platform,
solutions,
customers,
customer experience,
value capture,
processes,
organization,
supply chain,
presence,
networking, and
brand.

Sounds like good advice, pick one! Here are some ideas, focused on using web 2.0 technologies, social networking applications and community software solutions to implement them.

Tags:

innovation platform

open source

mashups

social web applications

xml

rich internet applications

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Business Development Ideas

One Del.icio.us Ideascape

jim wilde — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 11:53:28 +0000

A week or so ago, I was exploring del.icio.us (social bookmarking) to learn what was new in the blogosphere. I usually start with my own tags (bookmarking, folksonomy, taxonomy, content management, knowledge management, idea management, enterprise blogging, innovation, etc.) to discover who has similar interests. I discovered "Contentious" under folksonomy. After reading through several of the posts, I added the RSS feed to my news aggregator. This simple process, knowledge sharing, yields big returns. Anyway, I came across a post from that explains how-to use bookmarking and tagging services better than anything else I've read.

Understanding the concepts behind bookmarking and tagging is important for anyone considering social networking applications. Let me explain. To begin with, social networking applications can fulfill any number of requirements. From content management and knowledge management to idea management and even a gigantic learning and development environment, the platforms have a lot going on, which makes them seem overly complex. They aren't! What's more, if you toss in social media, enterprise blogs, wikis, forum, chat, taxonomy, folksonomy, etc, well, things get easily jumbled up. So to gain perspective on bookmarking, tags, etc., and how most people would benefit from them read the following post.

Furl and Del.icio.us: Almost Perfect Together - As I've mentioned before, two web-based tools I use extensively to keep track of important or interesting online information are Furl and del.icio.us. Both of these tools help me file links that I wish to remember or recommend, and allow me to share that information flexibly. Over the last few months I've developed my own way of using these two tools together. It suits me, and I think it suits the unique strengths of each tool. So in case it's useful to others, here's how I use Furl and del.icio.us together...

Update: Amy Gahran, from Cententious has a new post "Use Tagging for a Networked Index? Hmmmmâ€¦." that delves into the discovery process using del.icio.us.

Clients are mainly interested in access to their content as opposed to origin. In other words, who has access to their information. I am bringing this up because bookmarking on del.icio.us exposes information to the public. With Ideascape, you can publish your posts internally and/or externally, which means that it can be made public or remain private. For example, if your company is using the service and you have 1000 employees, each could have their own blog â€“ or 1000 blogs for your company's account. Whether each employee's post is made public or kept internal depends on the nature of the content. Of course there are permissions that can be set that will allow certain users or user groups the ability to publish externally or internally, depending on your needs.

Using del.icio.us for external bookmarking is great, and we would ncourage your employees to use it. But even with delicious, a serious internal classification system(s) is needed to maximize the shared understanding of an organization's content. Ideascape uses a central repository with both a taxonomy and a folksonomy. A well-defined taxonomy makes finding content fast and easy, while a folksonomy is slower but the discovery of new content delivers magic. Within Ideascape, the internal bookmarking/tagging system we use is based on the same concepts as delicious, letting the magic happen.

FYI, I am right in there with Joshua Schachter, (the delicious developer) on all the ideas being discussed on how to make it better. Many of those ideas make it into Ideascape with limited disruption or down time.

BTW, we also have a stand-alone bookmarking/tagging service for those businesses that want to have their own. Employees would use it the same way as delicious.

Tags:

enterprise mashups

social web applications

Social Media:

Web 2.0 website development

web design website development

Open Source CMS

Getting ideas

jim wilde — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

On the fly tagging is important because with many new ideas (half-bakeded ones), it is difficult to explain them. Simple tagging is not categorizing but a way to informally describe something in our own words. Malcolm Gladwell, author of "The tipping point " and "blinks" offers some anecdotes on why we can’t trust people’s opinions — because we don’t have the language to express our feelings (audio file from IT conversations with Mr. Gladwell). I believe that using simple words and metaphors - tags, we can describe new meaning to our feelings about new ideas. READY...dig in to your company's subculture and harvest raw ideas... People want to participate! To find out how your people are dealing with daily challenges, start with internal blogs. The simple tagging system in Ideascape pushes the most active tags, those getting the most attention, to the top of a list. In addition, employees from other parts of the company are seeing action on a problem or challenge and may have something to contribute. On every blog entry, every word in the text that has an external tag (those from the net) have a clickable icon next to them to indicate that their are discussions on the net. The user can choose to follow these leads and join a relevent discussion to find ideas, solutions or gain greater insights. Ideascape improves the management, flow, and quality of ideas, both small and big ones across the organization. Use it to classify, cultivate, spread, and apply ideas that target specific circumstances, aggregate themes or future possibilities. In other words, to get fast, meaningful results, put your goals and the realities of the business in sync with the daily work activities of your people and customers and what they value. Listen! AIM... Challenges, Opportunities.Get qualitative ideas from multiple sources – even unconventional ones that offer diversity and independence - blended and synthesized with your own. Ideascape instantly establishes relationships with internal and external tags (those from the net) which leads to more and better ideas. Imagine having an immediate feedback to capture the company’s informal social network – the daily problems, challenges, and opportunities that your employees and customers face. From resource allocation and processes to priorities and values - your people can create innovative solutions to complex problems.FIRE! ... Execute ideas to increase efficiency, reduce waste, improve the bottom line and most of all - make people happy.What can I learn from this?

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