I think serendipity is part of what underlies Metcalfe’s Law and a big part of the explanation for Eric Raymond’s insight that ‘given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.’ Knowledge workers and their organizations should be doing everything possible to increase opportunities for serendipity. This means searching broadly for information, narrating work so that others can become aware of it, asking questions to the biggest possible audience without presupposing who might have the answers, and generally contributing to and drawing from the biggest possible digital commons. This is what Enterprise 2.0 should be all about.
Quite a few people – at least those that read this blog and others like it – are comfortable with the idea of mashups, the activity of taking data from one source, and combining it with one or more others to create something useful and interesting.
Often this happens on maps, but of course it doesn’t have to.
One potential application of this sort of technology which doesn’t get discussed much, certainly in the public services context, is enterprise mashups, in other words applying these techniques within the organisation, behind the firewall. So, taking a set of data or statistics from one department and mashing it up with another.
I’d read about enterprise mashups before, but the idea didn’t really catch on until I saw Bill Ive’s post about JackBe, a vendor providing a platform for organisations to do this stuff. Here’s a video giving an example of how JackBe can be used:
I certainly remember my days as a Business Analyst at a county council where I spent days taking information from one source and having to reformat it to make it play nicely with another, usually in Excel. Having a tool like this available would have made life much easier.
Here’s a whitepaper explaining all this in more detail (PDF warning).
(Obviously, there are other providers of enterprise mashup platforms and not just JackBe, it’s just that I wasn’t looking at their websites when I was writing this post.)
On Monday (14th) I will be attending the Social Media World Forum Europe conference, at London’s Olympia venue. It looks like quite a big do.
I’m also going to appear on a couple of panels, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.
The morning’s panel – at 10:30 – is a workshop on ‘What are Politicians doing in Web 2.0?’ focusing in on:
What tools Obama and his team used to gain success in social media space
Who’s tweeting?
Number 10 – how the prime minister’s office are embracing social media
I’ll be sharing a stage with Paul Staines (aka Guido Fawkes), Scott Redding of the Green Party and my good pal Simon Dickson off of Puffbox.
In the afternoon – at about 5pm – I’ll be discussing the use of social tools behind the firewall as part of the Enterprise Social Media Forum, in a session called ‘The integration of social business software with Social Media feedback to building your business and brand’.
With me on the panel will be luminaries of the enterprise 2.0 scene David Terrar, Andy McLoughlin and Per Rombouts.
Other sessions I’ve spotted featuring friends of DavePress are Ingrid Koehler, who will be on a workshop panel discussing the impact of social media on elections, at about 11am, and Jemima Gibbons, who is discussing how to write the case for using online communities in business, sometime in the morning (it’s not quite clear on the agenda – PDF warning).
The Google Buzz playbook will resemble the current Apps and Docs strategy. Aim Buzz at the smaller companies first since they are the low-hanging fruit. Large enterprises will stick with SharePoint for now until Google makes the ROI case over time like the company currently does with Exchange.
If Google Buzz becomes Google corporate Buzz it could be disruptive. Enterprises could potentially use it to save on Sharepoint licenses. It’s all about the collaboration.
Google Apps has it own faults to work out, before Google Buzz can even be considered a viable service for the enterprise. The Google Buzz open architecture may be the difference though, creating real opportunities for customers to pull external data into its real-time environment.
It will certainly be interesting to see how this plays out.
I had a very interesting hour today, chatting with James Brown and Dave Coplin at Microsoft. James works with the public sector all over the world, while Dave concentrates his effort on the UK. Dave also came along to last weekend’s govcamp – good man!
We had a great discussion about the state of public sector IT and the big issues, like open data, innovation and collaboration in government.
No one once claimed that Windows 7 was their idea.
I think it’s important that big vendors like Microsoft – and Google, IBM, SAP and others – are involved in these discussions. Here’s a few reasons why:
These guys know a lot of stuff, and they aren’t afraid to share it
Like it or not, a lot of public sector organisations buy their IT from bigco. If we – by which I mean the community of people interested in open and effective government – want real change to happen, these guys need to be involved in the conversations
Further, for long term technology enabled change to be sustainable within the huge – and not so huge – organisations that make up the public sector, the big boys have to be involved
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the issues we are all talking about are platform neutral. It’s in everyone’s interest that government becomes more innovative and collaborative, whether you are a civil servant, a one man govweb revolution, or a multinational supplier
Both James and Dave are keen to be a part of the conversation and the discussion around open government and the use of technology in organisations to drive improvement and efficiency. Dave even volunteered to write something for this blog in the near future – and now I’ve written it here, it looks like he’ll have to.
