Back in the beginning of May, I left Optaros and started working across the river in Cambridge at ISITE Design.

I spent five years at Optaros, and learned a tremendous amount from both the leadership and the staff with whom I delivered projects. I spent time in Switzerland, Germany, and London, as well as Austin and San Francisco, working in Optaros offices and on client sites. I wish them continued success in the social commerce / innovative commerce world; but it was time for me to move on.

ISITE Design is a smaller (~60 person) digital agency, which has been delivering to clients for 14 years. We’re headquartered in Portland (OR), with offices in Boston and Los Angeles. I first became aware of ISITE Design when they launched the CMS Myth back at Gilbane Boston in 2007. I’d met the “mythbusters” and other ISITE Design leadership folks over the years, and always respected their commitment to clients, to organic growth, and to putting strategy at the center of the digital conversation. (It’s also the home of El Consultador, one of my personal inspirations as a consultant).

At ISITE, I’ll be focused on digital strategy and account management, helping to grow the ISITE presence nationally and continue to build on ISITE’s core CMS practice. I hope to also help bust some myths about open source CMS’s, if we can just find a cape that fits . . .

Here’s just a bit of what’s been happening at ISITE since I joined – sign up for ISITE Insight to stay informed:

• ISITE Design were finalists in the MITX Innovation Awards, in the “Doing Good” category for Food Hub, a Portland based exchange for connecting local food producers with their customers
• We launched Day2, an optimization service “to help organizations measure and improve their digital channel with data-driven insights and actions”
• ISITE was named (again) to Portland Business Journal’s Fastest Growing 100 Private Companies list – and received a Lighthouse award for having been on the five years in a row!
• We bought a building in Portland, for the new corporate headquarters. Plans, photos and more: breaking ground

In other words, it’s a pretty busy place, full of smart people with a dedication to doing good work and helping clients succeed. Just the way I like it.

Thesis: Open Source and Design are fundamentally philosophically incompatible. Antithesis: Open Source and Design are profoundly similar in core beliefs and approaches. This talk works to articulate a meaningful synthesis between these two positions.

The talk, unfortunately, wasn’t accepted for presentation at the conference, but they suggested that instead I do a shorter, podcast or video podcast version for the Extended Content program.

I did, and that content now has gone live on the SXSW site:

In our first installment of the Extended Content series, John Eckman tells you everything you need to know about open source and design. The differences and similarities, how they benefit each other and why they have trouble getting along.

Extended Content at SXSW Interactive

(Unfortunately they don’t allow embedding, so you’ll have to go there to watch it – and at least on two browsers I tried it on, you’ll have to wait for the whole thing to preload before it starts playing – so go get a cup of coffee or whatever while it loads).

It’s just shy of 20 minutes, and having been created back in February 2009 feels (to me) a bit outdated in spots – mostly the continued evolution of the work Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt have been doing with the Drupal community (not just on Drupal.org but also on Drupal 7 itself), which I encourage you to check out if you’re interested in the subject.

It’s Thursday, December 4th, from 3:30-5:00pm. The panelists will be:

• Nate Aune of Jazkarta (Plone / Zope / Python)
• Elie Auvray of Jahia
• Michael Wechner of Wyona (Lenya, Yanel, Yulup)

Here’s the description from the official program:

There are many open source content management solutions available today, reflecting a wide variety of capabilities and costs, and organizations of all types are more willing than ever to consider them in place of, or along side commercial CMSs. This session will look at some of the pros and cons of deploying open source content management systems in terms of licensing, costs, maintenance, and functionality to help you determine if they are an appropriate option for your organization.

In addition to all of that, I also hope we’ll talk about how the adoption landscape is or isn’t changing for open source in the CMS space, innovation and standards compliance in open source CMS, and how open source projects can make user adoption easier or more effective.

What questions would you like to ask this group of speakers? How do you see the landscape changing for open source projects in the content management space?

Although voting by prospective attendees is only “about 30%” of the decision making process, I figured I should promote my submissions here, and hope that readers of this blog might be interested in commenting on them or voting for them in the panel picker. (Although they call it the panel picker – no one can resist alliteration – it includes sessions which are solo speakers or dual speakers as well as more tradition 4-5 person panels).

So here are the sessions I proposed (links go directly to the Panel Picker):

Managing User Generated Content

The age of content being managed only by authorized professionals is over. Users expect to contribute to, rate, review, recommend, filter, tag, and moderate their experiences on the web. What does this mean for designers and content management professionals? How do you encourage appropriate behavior and discourage spam and vandalism, without completely reverting to non-participation?

Open Source and Design: Ideologies Clashing

Thesis: Open Source and Design are fundamentally philosophically incompatible. Antithesis: Open Source and Design are profoundly similar in core beliefs and approaches. This talk works to articulate a meaningful synthesis between these two positions.

Managing Your Online Identity Outside the Walled Garden

(Dual talk with Joshua Porter). This talk will cover 3 basic ideas: 1) What Managing Identity means these days and why it is important 2) Off-the-shelf technologies that help you manage your Identity 3) A DIY (Do-it-yourself) approach to managing your Identity…how you can roll your own identity services using existing pieces

The first is really an updated version of this talk from Web Content 2008, which seemed to go over well.

The second is inspired by r0ml’s series of OSCON talks over the last 3 years: rambling, philosophical, and entertaining in addition to being educational and thought-provoking. I’m sure I’ll fail to live up to his example but have fun in the process. I tried to update the description in the panel picker but failed – here’s what I was trying to add:

The context for me is in trying to articulate why free and open source projects have historically found it difficult to recruit / retain / attract designers as contributors. (Or, depending on your point of view, why open source projects have been so inhospitable to the design-oriented contributors who show up).

Thesis: Open Source and Design are philosophically incompatible.

Open Source is about enabling anyone and everyone to share the same code base. Open source pushes markets toward commodity status, leveling the playing field by making the same technology available to all. Design, by contrast, is about differentiation; standing apart from the crowd and being unique on the basis of creative innovation.

Besides, Open Source projects are ugly, and only engineers can use them. Well designed, beautiful, and easy to use projects have always come from proprietary approaches.

Antithesis: Open Source and design are profoundly similar in core beliefs. Open source and design are both based in solving problems based on known patterns. Good artists copy, great artists steal. Maybe some very small portion of “design” is about differentiation, but design is much broader than that subset. Also, many open source projects differentiate and innovate – sometimes on ease of use.

Besides, many open source projects are now actively pursuing design contributions, running usability studies, encouraging themes/skins, and working to compete with proprietary software on both “eye candy” and ease of use.

Synthesis: How can open source projects benefit more from the talents of the design community (across visual design, interaction design, information architecture, usability, and branding)? How can designers and design communities benefit from the lessons of free and open source software?

The third is a joint talk with Joshua Porter, whose book Designing for the Social Web is a must read. He’ll be talking about some of the “off the shelf” services available to help you manage your online identity (like Chi.mp), and I will be talking about the DIY approach, assembling together from free and open source software an online identity management toolbox.

The opening session was Wednesday afternoon with Mark Driver : Gartner’s Open Source Scenario for 2007: Risks and Rewards for Mainstream IT.

This was the session which led to this Network World article and corresponding Slashdot flame-fest. But both missed what I thought was a perfectly rational set of statements:

1. that commercial software vendors cannot ignore open source as a disruptive innovation
2. that commercial software vendors are increasingly incorporating open source in a non-trivial fashion, and
3. that this trend will continue to deepen over the next four years.

Driver walked through some basic definitions and argued that we’re in a Third-Wave of Open Source reactions from Corporate IT: whereas many people in Enterprise IT departments first reacted to open source with some mixture of indifference and irrational emotion (that is both pro and con), the current phase is one characterized by “realism” – which will lead ultimately to “leverage.”

I suppose one could argue it is because of the company I keep, but I’d argue a large number of commercial enterprises passed realism and have been enjoying leverage for some time – but otherwise I think the model is accurate enough in describing the process many organizations go through in learning about open source.

One interesting point Driver made was that open source tends to create “Investment Protection” where proprietary software creates / ensures Intellectual Property protection. In the open source world, the investment the user or adopting organization makes gets preserved, because there is real vendor independence. In the commercial world there is real protection for the investments of the producing organization.

In addition Driver showed Gartner research which demonstrated that many organizations are using open source in “mission-critical” applications – that the percentage of open source software used in a mission critical application was almost the same as the percentage of internally developed or commercially purchased (non-OSS) software used in mission critical applications.

Driver argued that the adoption prioties are changing as open source moves further into the adoption curve and becomes more maintstream or is adopted b more conservative adopters. Where earlier adopters (“technology aggressive adopters”) focused on open source because it provided flexibility and independence, later adopters will be more focused on cost savings and risk mitigation. (All four motivators are important to both audiences – in Driver’s argument it is just their relative priority which changes).

Driver talked about the possibility of an increasing bifurcation within the open source community between “community class open source” projects versus “business class open source” – differentiated not some much by their features or specific license but by the goals, aims, and cultures of project governance. For conservative adopters whose focus is cost and risk avoidance, community class open source may not be a viable option, whereas for technology aggressive adopters the business class open source may be too slow moving or non-innovative. Additionally, he described the emergence of “gated source” options, which lie somewhere between the open source and proprietary models,

Driver listed four factors enterprises should consider in planning open source adoption:

• Fitness of Purpose (does the software do what you need it to do, well)
• Maturity (is the software project well governed, and capable of reliably producing quality?)
• Your technology adoption profile (is your organization an early, mainstream, or late adopter of new innovations?)
• Deployment scenario (how will the app be used, in the context of the organization’s mission? Is it mission critical?)

He closed by noting that “ignoring open source is not a viable option” and that the days of “skunk works” adoption are over. Enterprises should be planning adoption strategies, just as they have corporate management strategies around procuring commercial / proprietary / closed source software.

—

Unfortunately, given the overlap of the Web Innovation and Open Source summits I didn’t get to attend Nikos Drakos‘ session on “Open Source in the Workplace: What it Promises and What it Delivers,” but based on the ppt from the session I think I would have enjoyed it . He covered the growth of open source outside the “infrastructure and development tools” categories – into areas like content management, collaboration, and customer-facing communications. He also went into the leverage of open source collaboration principles in other contexts – perfect lead up to Yochai Benkler’s Keynote on Thursday.

In Jeff’s description:

In this podcast we discuss some of the details behind the Liferay-Alfresco-Roller solution Optaros recently implemented for one of our clients . . .

Or Ian’s:

Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are hot on everyone’s lips at the moment. In this Podcast I interview Jeff Potts, of Optaros, about an Alfresco application they have delivered that brings together:

• Alfresco outside the firewall
• Alfresco inside the firewall

• Alfresco for document management
• Alfresco for Web Content Management

In this Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 project, Alfresco is integrated with:

• Portal – Liferay
• Blog – Roller
• Tagging – Alfresco

Specifically we discuss:

• The goals of the project
• Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 and characteristics of these types of projects
• The components used in the solution
• The consumerization of IT – Web 2.0 Components within the Enterprise
• How to find out more

The folks at SixApart have announced that coinciding with the release of Movable Type 4, there will be an open source edition of Movable Type, which will form the basis for the commercial products.

The Movable Type Open Source Project was announced in conjunction with the launch of the Movable Type 4 Beta on June 5th, 2007. The MTOS Project is a community and Six Apart driven project that will produce an open souce [sic] version of the Movable Type Publishing Platform that will form the core of all other Movable Type products.

I can understand Rod Begbie’s quip (“I’ll take ‘Two Years Too Late’ for $400, please, Alex”) and I too found the inability to spell “open source” correctly rather strange – I guess MovableType doesn’t have built-in spell check, even in 4.0 beta?.

I tried to leave a comment on the announcement page asking them about the relationship between the MTOS version to come and the existing Movable Type Enterprise edition – but their openID login seems broken. (At least it fails on my openID in firefox on linux: “Could not discover claimed identity: empty_url: Empty URL”). That may also be why no one’s yet corrected the spelling of “souce” in the first paragraph.

I assume that the “Enterprise” edition will continue to be sold commercially with the OS code underlying it – but how much will be “held back” for the enterprise edition? Also unspecified is what relationship, if any, the MTOS code base will have to Six Apart’s other commercial offerings – Vox, for example, which is a hosted service.

I do think, though, that this will have a positive impact – for Six Apart and for enterprises trying to figure out how to leverage blogging platforms in the context of intranets and collaboration spaces as well as marketing efforts and corporate communications.

With the Enterprise 2.0 conference coming up next week, I’ve been thinking about blogging platforms as part of an overall corporate framework for knowledge management, collaboration, and the like – as part of an Enterprise 2.0 solution, in short. Not having an open source version made MovableType more difficult to leverage in such an approach, and having one should open up new opportunities for interesting combinations. (Movable Type was already bundled into Suite Two offering, but that is a closed source, fixed bundle – not really an open framework).

MTOS should be available in Q3 of 2007.

Check out the press release or hit the Alfresco Partner page on the Optaros site for more info about what kinds of work we’re delivering on Alfresco’s platform.

I don’t normally blog here about projects Optaros has been involved in, but I think this article in the Current is too good to pass up sharing: “It’s public radio, but with nearly everything different, including the name”

It describes the new station/site (in which Optaros was involved) from Chicago Public Radio called :Vocalo.

There will be a website, but it would be wrong to say that it’s the station’s website. Really, it’s the website’s radio station.
The name, :Vocalo, is an invention, essentially “Vocal” with an “o” at the end. It rhymes with “Zocalo,” a Spanish word that in Mexico refers to a town plaza and in Colombia refers to the infrastructure that stabilizes a large building. The colon before the “V” is intentional — a trademarked emoticon.

The part that I think is most interesting is how involved the potential audience – not the current CPR audience, but the residents of the area the station could potentially serve – were in the process:

In eight focus groups, we gave special attention to the people who had, for various reasons, rejected us but were potential listeners—people who were committed to the area, who volunteered in the community, who follow the news and use radio. We asked them to listen to WBEZ for a week, keep diaries of what they thought, and meet for two-hour group conversations. Then we took questions that arose in the focus groups and surveyed listeners by mail.
These potential listeners were intensely interested in information and discussion about our shared place, the Chicago area. African-American, Latino and Asian-American non-listeners in our surveys and focus groups placed their highest value on local service. They sought it in our broadcast day and held it to high standards—not of production quality but of accuracy and relevance. They were highly critical of what they heard.

Taking the results of the listener (and non-listener) research, which the article sums up as “Nearly all felt the station was not for them – and was not trying to be inviting,” the CPR team went through a sustained and quite strategic effort to make honest changes – not just to rest on their traditional audience but to reconnect with their strategic mission.

One of the results of that work is the new site and station:

This new station will be built on community radio sensibilities but without the characteristic schedule of special-interest shows. In fact, it will have no shows at all. It will air a continuous, seamless talk-based stream completely devoted to Northwest Indiana and Chicago metropolitan area culture, issues and selected music.

It’s also available as an online stream, for those of us outside greater Chicagoland.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out over time as a format and as a concept – reclaiming public media by reconnecting it its core mission.

Involving your community in creating your product has lessons that go well beyond public radio, of course – we all have to be open to reimagining what it is we “do” and how it does or doesn’t meet the needs of current users and prospective users.

The Christian Science Monitor would like to invite you to attend an Alfresco Enterprise Content Management Meet-up in Boston:
Time: 11am – 3pm (Lunch provided with RSVP)
Place: 200 Massachusetts Ave
The First Church of Christ, Scientist
Boston, MA 02115 (map)
Parking: Available on site $5.00
To Attend: Please send RSVP to dannerr at csps dot com.

My colleague Jeff Potts will be speaking about using Alfresco as a platform for application development – you can read more about it at his blog, ecmarchitect.com.

Ironically, I can’t make it as I’ll be in Austin at SXSW (while Jeff, whose actually from Texas, will be here in Boston) – but it should be an interesting even for those interested in ECM, open source, and Alfresco.

The first is the Public Media 2007 conference, from February 20th to 24th, at the Marriott Copley Place.

Optaros is an event sponsor and Seth will be participating in a pre-conference panel (Choosing CMS Solutions) on the 21st. I plan to be there every day, and though I may have to spend some of that time manning (personing?) the official Optaros booth, I’ll get to (and blog about) as many sessions as I can.

The content looks very interesting – take a look at the session schedule or the conference wiki.

Immediately following Public Media is Beyond Broadcast, which is being held Saturday the 24th, at the Stata Center at MIT.

You can check out the schedule, review the available working groups, and find out who’s coming.

They were developed as part of the BBC 2.0 project, and (maybe only because 2.0 was already in the title of the project?) they avoided calling them the BBC’s Fifteen Web 2.0 principles.

You should visit Tomski’s site to read the whole list, but it’s really good stuff.

My favorites (of the moment – they keep changing) are:

13. Let people paste your content on the walls of their virtual homes: Encourage users to take nuggets of content away with them, with links back to your site

14. Link to discussions on the web, don’t host them: Only host web-based discussions where there is a clear rationale

The web after all is a web – the more interconnections between sites and pages there are, the better. (Not random links created by blogspam or to trick search engines, of course, but real links created by humans who found connections they feel are meaningful).

• SixApart‘s Movable Type (blog)
• SocialText (wiki)
• NewsGator (rss feed management)
• SimpleFeed (rss publishing)
• SpikeSource (integration, support)

Josh Bancroft, an Intel employee, and self-described “Technology Evangelist and Geek Blogger,” was fairly critical of the launch announcement. Josh critiques the product for being proprietary and expensive, pointing out that free, open source tools are available to accomplish the same goals. In essence, he criticized Intel for operating in a traditional product development mode rather than the new Web 2.0 paradigm: offering a web 2.0 product wrapped in web 1.0 clothing:

Do you know what all of that feels like to those of us who actually get excited about arcane, geeky ideas like having company-wide blogs and wikis? It feels like a big company trying to embed their marketing axe in our heads, and manipulate us into convincing our bosses to spend the money on these tools. Thanks, but no thanks.

Josh’s post is well worth reading on its own, as a critique of companies trying to continue to operate in traditional proprietary software models, but it’s especially worth reading given that Anil Dash (from SixApart) responded in the comments.

Anil’s reply hits a few defensive notes – “I think you need to step back a bit and realize you’ve got nothing to prove by dissing an Intel project while working at Intel” – but the great majority of it is a well reasoned and thoughtful response.

In essence, Anil argues that, in order to get enterprises to understand the world of wikis and blogs, we need a combination of new and old methods:

I know exactly what it feels like to those of us who are like that: I’ve worked on spreading the word about blogs in business all day every day for four years. I’ve literally spoken to tens of thousands of people about this topic in person all over the world. We’ll use every tool at our disposal to get new people blogging, and it’s not going to happen simply by us blogging about it and letting geeks download the code. It’s going to take every tactic we have to cajole companies, kicking and screaming, into using these tools. And it’s too important a cause to risk not using traditional media and the channels that are familiar to these audiences.

In other words, rather than carrying the coals to Newcastle, or preaching to the converted, we need to be able to operate in traditional ways enterprise buyers understand.

(Side note on carrying coals: Lord Timothy Dexter, one of the most infamous former residents of the town where I live, actually made lots of money exporting coal to Newcastle during a coalminer’s strike.)

So is Intel the new Lord Dexter? Is the combination of applications with SpikeSource support enough to move boxes of Web 2.0?

In trying to bring the consumer-driven, participatory, agile, small-pieces-loosely-joined, open-source driven nature of Web 2.0 to Enterprise IT, do we risk becoming assimilated?

Will Web 2.0 remake the Enterprise or will the Enterprise remake Web 2.0 in its own image?

Some recent blog posts confirm my impression that the old command-and-control, edited-by-someone-in-HR intranet is being quietly replaced by a combination of wikis, blogs, and social bookmarking type applications.

First, Andrew McAfee describes the Avenue A | Razorfish use of MediaWiki:

What I found most interesting about the company was its own Intranet. To hear David, Ray, and Amy tell it, the company’s traditional static Intranet — the place where an employee would go to look up benefits information or peruse the latest press releases — still exists, but has been marginalized by a suite of Enterprise 2.0 tools.

I like the way they are leveraging flickr, del.icio.us, and digg to ingest content from the internet into their intranet, and gain from some collaborative filtering. (A few other bloggers, however, have noted potential privacy issues with this approach: see Tagging Behind the Firewall and Use of Online RSS and Bookmarking Services).

McAfee also focuses on their use of a “smart mixture of standardized and freeform content.” In other words, some structure is provided, but then users are allowed to mix-in (mash up?) within that loose structure.

Innovation Creators, in a post summarizing the Web 2.0 summit last week (“The Week Enterprise 2.0 Became Reality“), pointed to a demo of QEDWiki that IBM has posted on YouTube. It’s interesting, both because IBM is using YouTube to distribute it, but also because it’s a good demo of what’s possible with the “mashup” approach to development within large enterprises.

You can find a bit more about it here on DeveloperWorks, though I have to say it’s really way too difficult to get any real info about it. The video itself just points viewers to www.ibm.com/developerworks/ where they will find no mention of QEDWiki, and it isn’t found in their own search engine.

Is using YouTube here a way of getting around a too-structured content management infrastructure within developerworks / alphaworks?

Elsewhere, the IBM Watson Research Center is home to a project called Dogear, which tries to leverage social bookmarking functionality in an intranet context. In their words:

Dogear exploits the enterprise by allowing people to bookmark pages within their Intranet. In addition it uses enterprise directories to authenticate the user’s identity. This allows people to find experts on specific topics within the company. For example, a employee looking for someone knowledgeable in Java can look at the dogear “java” tag to see who has been bookmarking pages around that topic. Dogear will also show tags associated with “java,” which may help to refine the search. Once users have found a potential expert, they can see that person’s bookmarks, internal blog, and contact information. This form of expertise location helps spur collaboration and sharing of resources within the company.

Of course, one has to have an intranet large enough for social bookmarking to make sense. The project is described in greater detail in an article from Queue magazine.

At Optaros, I don’t think we ever had a first-generation Intranet to be supplanted. Our corproate intranet is in MediaWiki (the software behind Wikipedia as well as the AARF example in McAfee’s post above). Here’s my “employee” page:

Many Optaros employees blog regularly (I’ve got a subset of that list in my blogroll widget in my left sidebar) externally, but we also have an installation of Roller in place for internal blogs, which are aggregated together (along with a Technorati feed on ‘Optaros’) into a wiki page.

Additionally, we leverage Trac (with integration hooks to Subversion and Continuum) for project-based spaces. Here’s an example from a made up client (Acme):

Finally, we also use Alfresco solution for document management, discussions, and collaborative spaces with workflow and version control.

Between all these tools and our internal IM Jabber server, we’ve got an embarrassment of riches when it comes to working collaboratively. In fact, we’ve removed all the barriers – so now there are no excuses for not collaborating.

What’s your organization doing to encourage user collaboration behind the firewall? Is the new mode adding to the existing corporate intranet, being developed in parallel to it, or replacing it?

One feature that caught my attention was a piece in Information Week titled Under Construction.
Could have been called “currently in Beta” of course, to be more in line with the Web 2.0 meme,
but overall it’s a pretty decent piece, pulling together segments on the evolving infrastructure of Web 2.0 applications in terms of:

• Scale
• Content Management
• Security
• Lightweight Development
• The User Experience
• Communities

As well as an Interactive Timeline.

The piece on “Content Management” is probably the strongest of the bunch, noting that “what makes content management more difficult for many Web 2.0 companies is the need to deal with user-generated material,” while the major content management systems aren’t designed to handle high volumes of intake and meta data from external users.
Most content management systems were architected and programmed for a world in which people inside the firewall create content, and those outside the firewall consume it. The article quotes Jesse James Garrett on this: the Web 2.0 “definition of content management was completely outside what the vendors were considering when they created their software.”

The section on “Lightweight Development,” on the other hand, stretches credulity to claim that:

Two popular options–Ruby and Flash–are similar to Ajax, the lightweight, browser-based combination of JavaScript and XML on which Google Maps and other interactive sites are based. Unlike Ajax, which is relatively new, Ruby and Flash are Web site building technologies with mature toolsets.

Other than both being four letters, in what way is Ruby “similar to” Ajax?

I assume the attempt is to identify all three as “lightweight development frameworks” – though how does Flash fit into that model? Is Flex and its MXML really a lightweight framework?
The real point seems to be just to link the examples – he’s trying to talk about BackChannelMedia’s site and the Nike Store – the former is developed in Ruby, the latter in Flash (really, one assumes, it’s developed in Flex).
Second, in what sense is Ajax new compared to Ruby on Rails? As far as I can remember, Rails went 1.0 in late 2005, and was only publicly available in mid 2004 at some point.

Nevertheless, the article overall does a pretty decent job of explaining how all these various changes are linked together into a broader paradigm shift.

(Yes, I’m sure I’m not the first to make the comparison between “Under Construction” and “Perpetual Beta” – the title was a cheap excuse to use “under construction man” in my blog).

The authors (of the article, that is, not the blog post – both are well worth reading) begin with the assertion that collaborative, complex problem solving activities are critical to modern companies, and argue that “companies that make these activities–and the employees involved in them–more productive will not only raise the top and bottom lines but also build talent-based competitive advantages that rivals will find hard to match.”

Fair enough, but what’s this got to do with Enterprise 2.0?

First, managing employees in order to foster tacit interactions is different than managing for other kinds of productivity, and looks rather like the culture O’Reilly described as Web 2.0′s architecture of participation:

Managing for effectiveness in tacit interactions is about fostering change, learning, collaboration, shared values, and innovation. Workers engage in a larger number of higher-quality tacit interactions when organizational barriers (such as hierarchies and silos) don’t get in the way, when people trust each other and have the confidence to organize themselves, and when they have the tools to make better decisions and communicate quickly and easily.

Of course, this (removing barriers, giving people tools with which they can organize themselves and communicate) is precisely what next generation collaboration tools (wikis, blogs, and other online knowledge management tools) are all about. The traditional need for a large, complex IT infrastructure was itself one of those organizational barriers. (This is one of the reasons hosted services have been so popular – no need to work through central IT – just write a check and turn it on).

Second, what they uncovered in their study was that there were large degrees of variance in company performance, and that those variances were higher in “relatively tacit-interactive sectors.” In other words, there is greater opportunity for improved performance (or, if you’re a glass-half-empty kind of person, greater threat of falling behind) in areas where the kind of tacit interaction described above are most important. Top performers can differentiate by managing tacit interactions more effectively.

So how do I, as a manager, enable tacit interactions? “The focus of managerial action is to establish conditions that allow tacit interactions to emerge and flourish rather than trying to engineer connections from the top down.” Give people the tools, but otherwise focus on getting out of the way and removing barriers.

They give a few specific examples of what “creating the conditions that allow them to emerge” might look like:

• Google’s 20% on innovation policy for employees
• Innovation portfolios which emerge out of internal and external interactions
• Allowing and encouraging innovators to share their inventions and insights
• Allowing information to be shared laterally, across reporting channels and silos

Finally, they close with a few statements about technology, focusing on collaborative multiparty workflows, decision support tools, and tools which “promote the collaborative and dynamic pursuit, capture, and sharing of knowledge.” These aren’t the tools, they note, that traditional IT department approaches excel at producing. We will need tools which “are easy to set up and tear down as projects and strategic experiments come and go.”

Agile, easy to set up and tear down tools which focus on collaboration and data sharing?

Sounds like blogs and wikis based on open standards. If you rely on open source frameworks and components you further break down barriers as you don’t have to worry about the cost of licensing as you scale your use of such tools, and you can customize precisely to user needs, rather than buying in to some “enterprise” package that includes everything anyone might ever need.

Thanks to Seth Gottlieb and Bryant Shea (not Shea Bryant), I participated in the first episode of the new CM Professionals podcast, Malcontents. The other guest was Riccardo La Rosa, who is at Molecular with Bryant.

The topic was essentially Web 2.0, and what impact it has (or should have) on your enterprise CM strategy.

The podcast doesn’t yet have it’s own page or feed link (I will post it when it does) but

You can look for episode one on the Malcontents page or you can find it in the breaking news section at the top of the CM Pros site, or grab the mp3 directly (30MB, 33 minutes).

Special bonus – my dogs make a brief appearance in the background at about 26 minutes in – you may have to turn it up a bit to really make them out but they’re barking up a storm – presumably the newspaper got delivered or the mailman came. It’s their first podcast too.

Open Source Content Management Webinar

Begins: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 at 1:00 PM

Ends: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 at 2:00 PM

Location:

Link: Interactive Webinar: Ask the Experts Your Questions About Open Source Content Management

Tags: Open Source Content Management

Seth Gottlieb, who is organizing the panel and blogged about it here, lays out an interesting agenda:

We are not going to talk about products, functionality, market share, magic quadrants or any of those boring vendor or analyst presentation topics. Instead, we are going to talk about the benefits and implications of open source software in the content management industry. Here are the types of questions we will be discussing

• Are there fundamental differences between open source and proprietary content management systems?
• How should an open source content management solution be selected?
• What types of organizations are best positioned to use open source software to solve their content management challenges?
• What are the benefits and limitations of open source content management systems?

The folks who will be joining Seth and I are Matt Asay of Alfresco and Paul Everitt of ZEA Partners.

Of course, like any good interactive panel, the real success of this will depend on the audience, the questions, and the level of interaction we develop.

So go register, block it off in your calendar, and think of challenging questions about open source in the context of content management.

He goes on to describe the various open source frameworks they leverage (including Spring, Hibernate, Lucene, EHCache, jBPM , Chiba, Open Office and ImageMagic) and the functionality they’ve used those frameworks to deliver. It’s really an outstanding read as an example of the compression of development time and flexible customization possible through an open source approach.

Additionally, Alfresco last week released the community preview of version 1.4 of their ECM suite. The focus in this version is on Business Process and Lifecycle Management, though functionality increases show up in a number of areas.

Finally, there’s also a podcast in which Newton discusses the release.