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Archive for Enterprise2.0

The Balance of Ease of Use and Information Secuirity with Enterprise Social Software

January 18, 2007 at 11:53 am ·

So I just finished doing some mandatory e-learning for a new project I am working on for a large enterprise. (Seriously just finished… I’m writing this in notepad) The topic was Information Security and it was honestly really interesting… as I did it I could not stop thinking about how Enterprise 2.0 will tackle the issues of securing an organizations’ information.

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.

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Enterprise Camp Toronto was a success.

January 17, 2007 at 7:17 pm ·

Enterprise Camp Toronto was a great event. As always it was a great event because the community came out and made it a great event.

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.

Enterprise Camp Video
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

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Competitive Analysis in Enterprise Environments

January 7, 2007 at 10:15 pm ·

I really love stealing good ideas Competitive Analysis. What I don’t like is how literally people take that word “competitive”.

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

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Links for Dec. 28 2006

December 28, 2006 at 6:17 pm ·

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BarCamp Toronto presents Enterprise Camp

December 17, 2006 at 6:28 pm ·

Enterprise Camp Comic

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.

Comments (1)

Getting Real on the Enterprise

August 17, 2006 at 8:17 am ·

Ok I know I ripped of the title but I do kinda reference slash promote the “book”.

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

Screen shot of video presentation in Quicktime Player

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

Referenced Materials:

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

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