What's on your mind?

<BG> - After reading through these use-cases, and hearing many others that have been profiled in the press, a few common themes seem to keep coming up:

1) Enterprise 2.0 "solutions" seem to work best when started as a greenfield or rogue application. Having to integrate, convince or train legacy systems to work with Ent/Web 2.0 apps is a losing battle. Essentially Ent2.0 needs a "gateway" to the legacy world, similar to what Mainframes/PCs had with TN3270 emulators, or Voice over IP had with IP/TDM Media Gateways. Then the problem gets focused around "how much legacy baggage MUST be dragged forward vs. feature nitpicks for legacy baggage".

2) Very few cases ever talk about projects expanding beyond a small group. For the Ent2.0 meme to be successful, it needs to be able to link information, people, expertise and experience across groups within a company. This isn't so much a limitation of the technology today (although policy is not very granular at this point), but is all about finding the right motivations to get people to share. The thing that groups need to focus on is not convincing mgm't to let them deploy the tool, but rather to convince them to change some of their compensation/motivation/acknowledgment systems to encourage people to contribute and actively engage in the systems. In the consumer world, people contribute because it's fun or seems like a hobby, but in the Enterprise, the fear of offending a co-workers or manager (and effecting your paycheck) is still too large.

3) While it's great that Ent2.0 tools now give users a level of empowerment, they still have certain concepts backwards to be really effective within the Enterprise. For example: Search is a simple interface, but it's fundamentally flawed because it's only useful if I already know what I'm looking for. What we need is "Find Me" or "Find the Topic" or "Find the <Job Role>". Recommendation and Relevance Engines should be smart enough to pull information from your User Profile, the documents/information your consumer, the people you communicate with, and start automated "finds" for relevant information and push it to a persistent space. Then the users are going to the space to browse information specific to a task, topic, job-role, etc., and others looking for similar information can also benefit without having to spend their time searching for the same information. Here's some case studies that I want to see solved soon:

Use Case #1:

Sales Representative in NY wants to sell a specific product to his customer. To help close the deal, he'll need several things:

a) A design/architecture document that explains how the product should be deployed in the customer's business

b) Product specification docs (data sheets, etc.)

c) Information about related products or technologies

d) Names of product experts within the company who can answers questions or provide input into sales strategies

e) Names of other Sales Representatives who have sold this product (could be anywhere in the country). It would be helpful if they also sold to customers in the same industry.

f) Access to any on-going or past Discussions about the product from people within the company (pros, cons, problems, etc.).

It would be extremely helpful if the system he used to gather this information had the following characteristics:

a) A persistent space (URL, 3D room, etc.) where information is dynamically gathered on a per Topic, Project, Team basis.

b) Has linkage to both information (documents, videos, trainings, discussions, user-feedback, related tags/metadata, etc.) and people/expertise information (social network linkage, expertise identification, interest identification, communication-channel reachability)

c) The spaces were suggested to the users based on input in their profile (task, team, areas of interest), or recent contextual information (email topics, documents opened on desktop, recent searches, etc.).

d) The spaces were able to capture feedback from the users so that other users were able to use the "collaborative knowledge" (wisdom of crowds) to learn what might be useful to them in the space.

Use Case #2:

A user within a team (new, transferred, etc.) brings alot of previous knowledge to the team. They have created several "profiles" within the system to collect information about various topics. They want to be able to share this information with the team, or specific users within the team. These "profiles" might be one of a few different things:

a) An automated tool which collects information about a specific topic, or closely related information. This is similar to an RSS-reader, except it would crawl a large variety of sources instead of specific sites (as RSS readers do today). - The tool could rank the collected information based on date, relevancy, source(s), associated user-rankings, etc. - The tool would be intelligent enough to filter out duplicates.

b) A snippet of social linkage between people. This might be a map of people working on a project (current or in the past), or having expertise on a subject, or having a common interest. This would be a subset of a large social network, but could highlight a specific context about how people are related/associated to that context.