Over at the Jive Software blog, Go Big Always, there are two interviews with attendees of the Jive Enterprise UI Summit.

First up is SAP’s Dan Rosenberg.

Do you see change occurring and if so, what’s driving that change?
The main thing that is changing is that the buying decision for enterprise software is moving from the CIO level and into the hands of the users themselves. These users have expectations based on popular retail products and the web.

Followed by Adobe’s Matthias Zeller

Do you see change occurring and if so, what’s driving that change?
Absolutely. I think engaging an easy to use user interface has become a sales driver and competitive differentiator in the world of enterprise software.

I’m honestly much more inclined to think like Dan Rosenberg over Matthias Zeller but that is because I am a pragmatist. That being said I certainly understand the potential for skunkworks
enterprise mashups.

This has been banging around in my head for a while. I was thinking about how I could write this up and expand upon the idea but I give up. So lets just throw it up on twitter and see if anything sticks.

If anything interesting comes out of it I’ll post it

When the user is in control
Configurability, personalization and sharing are not considered technologies by most users, they are a base use case for their personal lives. People understand control in a very serious way, and they know when they have it and when they do not.

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A couple of months ago I was taking to Jon Lax at the Toronto Expression Around the Clock event. I told him that I wanted to focus on enterprise user experience design and he looked at me as if I said I wanted to bring haute couture to prison uniforms. It is not that the idea is preposterous it is just something that has always seemed highly unlikely.

In a post today Robert Scoble asks “Any of you have any ideas on how to make business software sexy?”

Many of the Enterprise Irregulars led by Vinnie Mirchandani have blown up and said that sexiness is in the eye of the beholder. Don’t Weep for Underappreciated Enterprise Software by Dan Farber on ZDnet is a good launching post to see what people are saying.

Michael Krigsman wrote that Robert misses the point:

When I’m at home using Twitter, a great example of cool consumer software, I want to be delighted, thrilled, entertained, and engaged. When I transfer money through my bank, which is certainly a non-sexy enterprise system, I demand the system work every time without fail. There’s a big difference between enterprise and consumer systems, a lesson I suspect Robert Scoble is about to learn.

Nick Carr counters Michael’s argument:

By perpetuating a false dichotomy between the friendliness of consumer apps and the seriousness of business apps, all that Krigsman is doing is giving enterprise vendors cover for continuing to produce software that’s difficult and unpleasant to use. Scoble’s asking the right question.

This is where the whole debate forks from what Scoble was taking about. Michael Krigsman goes on to rip on Nick Carr: Carr talks about applications being friendly and Krigsman thinks that means easy to use. This exposes what I think is a common misconception that a good experience is more than ease of use — people need to be engaged.

There are many examples of applications that are useful, dependable, interesting, very slick, but not many enterprise applications that are engaging. I think that the aspect of sexiness that is missing from enterprise applications is JOY. John Morkes of Expero Inc. at the closing keynote of CanUX 2006 talked about the Joy of Use (PPT). In this presentation there is an example of how Quicken was trying to make their signature application more enjoyable. This was well before the idea of enterprise2.0 and consumer experiences on the enterprise. Companies are aware that their products need to be friendly and that it means more than easy to use.

It reminds me of when I present interface mockups to corporate clients: they often have more than one colour in them. There is always someone who feels that they are too bright or flashy for their organization. The corporate aesthetic that prefers monochrome designs comes out of a time when 4-colour printing was too expensive for internal communications. So decades of blue on white drab has become the norm, making people feel uncomfortable with bright colours that they associate with the marketing of consumer products.

I’m afraid that consumer experiences on the enterprise will not be as revolutionary as we all hope but a slower evolution.

I hope to talk more about this in the future and it reminds me that we have not had an EnterpriseCamp in Toronto for quite some time.

I needed to add this list by Anshu Sharma. It is a pretty amusing idea, like there is a Victoria’s Secret catalogue for CIOs out there where you can ogle some sweet SaaS:

Here are five things that turn CIO’s on:

1. VIRTUALIZATION: A data center that has fewer wires, requires less energy and is easier to manage is nothing short of an IT dream.
2. SaaS: Ability to rapidly deploy new functionality without having to buy new hardware and go through lengthy implementation cycles – its sexy the way a husband cooking dinner is sexy way for a wife. Again, it takes a certain eye and maturity.
3. VISIBILITY: Call it Business Intelligence, Business Activity Monitoring or Complex Event Processing, the ability to have both senior executives and employees performing the actual tasks be able to get actionable intelligence is huge.
4. COLLABORATION: I recently attended a Cisco telepresence session and I don’t care who you are and what you smoke, that stuff is outright sexy. And so is Oracle’s Social CRM.
5. TRANSACTIONS: Yes, age-old transactional applications. When they just work, its sexy. The way a plain perfect old black dress just works.

This is from Lawrence Liu’s Report from the Inside. It was posted a few months ago but it is one of those things I really like.

This is an amazing simple and straightforward presentation on why consumer web2.0 experiences need to infiltrate the enterprise. Without a familiar experience for your employess IT dollars will be wasted.

Our good buddy Sandy Kemsley was recently interviewed by Maggie K. Fox. of the Social Media Group. It is a great listen and I encourage you to check it out.

These concerns will have to be addressed for wide adoption of social software on the Enterprise; I’m not going to even get into Software as a Service (SaaS) because honestly that is a whole other conversation.

Large corporations need to keep their information secure to earn and maintain the trust of customers, regulators and business partners.

The issue is though that information needs to be available and easy to access when it is needed. As a third stage Guild Navigator says, “the spice must flow” :-P

A companies employees, customers, and business associates frequently use information on the enterprise to conduct their business. If access to relevant information and systems were interrupted, they would be unable to conduct their business properly.

I once talked to a team that was working on an extranet for an institutions board of directors. So while this was a simple information sharing extranet they had INSANE security requirements. Each board member had to remember 3 unique login credentials: one for access to the network, one for the extranet, and one for the document level security on the encrypted files.

So the problem was that this information was extremely sensitive and needed to be protected but board members had difficulty using the system because they had to remember three sets of login information and it was not like they were accessing the extranet every day. The board members said that the system was too hard to use so the team had to address this while ensuring that the corporations information remained secret. We went through many scenarios and technologies to try to solve this difficult problem and I left before the project really went anywhere.

Making sensitive information available while at the same time protecting it from unauthorized access and inappropriate disclosure is, of course, a delicate balancing act. The basic idea is to give authorized individuals access to the premises, systems and information they need, while keeping the unauthorized people out. These are difficult issues and one that the enterprise 2.0 community will deal with soon, but it will be a rough ride. — I’m looking at you Vista ;-) which isn’t really enterprise 2.0 but a upcoming thorn in my side.

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Oh I found this in my training and I found it kinda funny in a Lord Nikon, Angelina Jolie kinda way. From Social Software to Social Engineering

Social engineering – what is it?

Social engineering is the process of getting sensitive information, such as passwords, access rights and other sensitive information, by tricking employees.

Social engineers will use many different ways to get sensitive information from you. The best way to defend against social engineering is to ensure that you can recognize potential threats when they are happening and know how to deal with them.

The Community is the Framework.

I talked about Tagging and Ontologies and how they can be used on the Enterprise. It was a good discussion and I recorded it.

Download this presentation video in High Quality MP4

After the talk I found some great resources that will help continue the conversation.

On the UIE Brain Sparks blog Joshua Porter and Jared Spool have an excellent set of podcasts called Followup Discussion on Users as Information Architects: Is Tagging Right for Your Site?, Parts 1 & 2

In Part One they discuss:

• They talk about the differences between Categories, Tags and Keywords
• Tagging the CEO’s address – “Idiot”. Malicious Tagging and Spam.
• The incentive is not clear for tagging on Amazon: Personal Value must come before Social Value
• Automated Flickr clusters
• Digg is more social then Del.icio.us because Digg is influenced greatly by popularity

Continuing in Part Two they discuss:

• Using tags to direct people to relevant content over irrelevant content
• Do tags get old? If you tag a product "Latest Product" or "New" what happens when newer products come out? Can tags expire?
• Tagging and SEO: Since tags are user generated trigger words they could increase SEO
• Using tagging as a way to increase search engine relevance by tying tags to keyword weighting
• Using Delicious as a “Voice of Customer” research tool
• Consolidating multiple tags which are misspelled
• Personal Value always proceeds Social Value.

I wish I had listened to these before EnterpriseCamp as I think it would have helped me frame my presentation and the discussion better.

Hightouch has a good roundup of a bunch of related posts
Taxonomies vs folksonomies

• Beneath the Metadata:Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy (Where it all got started.)
• David Weinberger’s response (I can’t wait for his new book!)
• Gavin’s Digital Diner: Return to Beneath the Valley of the Metadata (Interesting post, but even more interesting comments.)
• N-TEN Connect: Taxonomies are for chumps (Holly wins me over!)

Remember this old (Internet time) adage:

Jakob’s Law of the Internet User Experience – Users spend most of their time on other sites.

Once you convince your project stakeholders that when you are building an website or application that competitors are not always direct competitors or even in the same vertical. You can sit down and go over the applications or sites that they enjoy using. I find that this gives me really valuable information into the design patterns that my client have in mind when they are envisioning the application that they want built.

Now it is hard enough to to convince people to indulge this activity normally, but when you are building an enterprise application and you are asking people to tell you why they like the Air Canada booking system it can become downright impossible to keep them engaged.  The one exception to this is when you are designing an enterprise search and everyone just wants it to be “like Google”. (Don’t get me started on that right now :-), I will discuss that later)

When you are defining requirements for your next enterprise application bring in some of the eventual end users of the system and have them talk about the sites that they like with the project stakeholders. You’ll get some insightful information that you can use in your design, your stakeholders will hear the “voice of their customers“, and if you are lucky hopefully this will aide in the adoption of social software on the Enterprise.

This will become even more important as Web 2.0 patterns start to infiltrate the enterprise (à la Enterprise 2.0).

Dion Hinchcliffe talks elegantly about infiltration in his Enterprise 2.0: Ten Predictions for 2007.

5. Consumerization of the enterprise will continue apace and will help drive Enterprise 2.0 adoption at the grassroots level. If any of this Enterprise 2.0 trend is really starting to happen, it’s because it reflects a better way of working that users are already adopting en masse on the Web. For example, blogging reaches more people than an e-mail can, and often in unexpected, serendipitous ways. “Spaces” build out a low-barrier, cost-effective personal channel on the Internet that provides a well-defined way for a user to communicate with the rest of the world or organization. These models are becoming well-understood and effective on the Web and will drive bottom-up adoption in the enterprise, often being pushed by newer, younger workers who are comfortable and conversant with them. Also, I suspect no solution to the empty quarter will be found in 2007.

I just wanted to remind people that EnterpriseCamp Toronto is happening this weekend on January 13th.

We wanted to get the enterprise development community together in Toronto in a BarCamp style unconference.

This is going to be a different focus then regular BarCamp events. This event focuses on enterprise software infrastructure, solutions and development. Topics could include Enterprise 2.0, Business Intelligence Applications, ECM, Collaboration, Employee Self-Service, Enterprise Search, Technology Infrastructure, Workflow Automation.

Here is what people are thinking of talking about:

• Ryan Coleman – I could put something together on Translation/Localization Workflow automation.
• Carsten Knoch – Porting Web 2.0 to the Enterprise: stop “empowering employees”, start looking for ROI :)
• Jevon Macdonald – Where does the software fit? 4 real enterprise 2.0 case studies
• Peter Childs & Ian Graham – Calendaring in the Enterprise
• Jeff Irving – I’d like to do a session on the value and practice of Domain Modeling during Requirements Analysis of Enterprise Applications.
• Bill Dunlop – I can put together an overview of WCF.
  (NOTE: that is “Windows Communication Foundation (formerly code-named “Indigo”) is a set of .NET technologies for building and running connected systems.” for the acronym impaired… :-)
• James Christopher – HPC applications and Visualization, how organizations use technology for competitive advantage and value creation.

Enterprise Camp (unconference edition) – January 13th, 2007
http://barcamp.org/EnterpriseCampToronto

So what do you do when your company is about to tear up an old telemarketing office to make way for a new floor of developers… you hold a BarCamp that’s what.

We are going to do a more specialized BarCamp this time one whose focus is on enterprise development and solutions.

So if you are in the Toronto area and are sick of holiday cheer come out and join us for some inperson knowledge sharing.

Check out the wiki to sign up and for more details.

… oh and ok-cancel rules.

I have already talked about SachaC at the first TorCamp enterprise 2.0 gathering but I have finally got of the perch and editted together the presentation that Bryce & I did with lots of help from Carsten.

The presentation is about development methodologies that are associated with Web 2.0 and how they can relate to the Enterprise, the experiences of the Navantis team on developing enterprise application with Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003, and a good discussion on the good and bad points of all the methods

Windows Media Version (63megs) or MP4 version (66megs)

Referenced Materials:

• Getting Real by 37Signals
• Corporate Intranets Best Practices Report – A User-Driven Web 2.0 Perspective by Avenue A / Razorfish
• Turn The Project On Its Head – Navantis SharePoint White Paper

Looking forward to the next time we get together for EnterpriseCamp Enterprise2.0. I really want to show SharePoint enabled collaboration with OneNote.