In The Next Version

Activity Streams - Jambalaya or Steak and Potatoes?

In my last post Don't Cross the Streams, I challenged the idea that integrating multiple sources of information into activity streams is a good thing. This struck a nerve with some people (mainly vendors) while others completely agreed with me. A friend of mine an fellow industry analyst suggested that I follow up by posting possible solutions, so below are the few of the areas I think can help:

1. Don't put stuff in there that doesn't belong
2. Display multiple streams
3. Allow people to organize lists
4. Provide several notification options
5. Manual filtering
6. Crowd (friend) sourced curation
7. Automated filtering via analytics


Silos Are Not Necessarily A Bad Thing

The first thing that will help reduce the noise in activity streams is to stop pushing everything and anything into them! When Facebook introduced frictionless sharing into the Ticker, 800M people revolted. Hopefully enterprise software will learn from this and vendors will realize that the benefits of open sharing can be quickly overshadowed by the annoyance of irrelevant information and the hindrance of context switching. Not everyone wants to see status updates in the same place they see support tickets or new sales opportunities.

Mission Control

If we are going to continue down the path of taking dozens of different pieces of information and cramming them into one place, then a single stream is not the way to go. Most Twitter clients have helped reduce the issue by enabling people to view multi-columns of streams at the same time. (popular examples: TweetDeck, Hootsuite and Seesmic) Columns are set up to display information from specific people or groups, keywords or search terms. I've like to see the enterprise software vendors offer multiple stream UIs.

Groups Are Not Lists

Google+, Facebook and Twitter also have features where you create subsets of people (named circles or lists) and let you switch between streams which only display posts from those. Most enterprise products like Yammer, SocialCast, Jive and Socialtext enable the creation of groups, but these are not the same as lists. A group is public (at least to it's members) and controlled by an admin. They are not ways of personally organizing people into buckets that mean something specific to you. For example, there is a big difference between a company's "Marketing Team" group and an individual's "Folks That Inspire Me" list. Google+ even allows people to share their Circles. I'd like to see enterprise software vendors offer personal lists.

Notification

While streams are great (or perhaps aren't) most employees don't sit and stare at them all day. In order to make sure they don't miss important information there should be options for being notified via email and/or SMS, as well as a dedicated feature in the stream UI that shows notifications. There should be notification options for things such as posts you're mentioned in, when people respond to your posts and when topics you're interested in are being discussed. Notification frequency can range from immediate to daily digests. Yes, I know these notifications just create more email, but for most people that is still a very necessary evil.

Manual Filtering

It is true that a majority of people will always use the default settings for any software product. However, it is important to provide options for those that want to change what information they see in streams.

TweetDeck does a great job enabling filtering at the global level (ex: I don't ever want to see Tweets with the #SXSW or #SuperBowl hashtag) and for each column. The filter can be either include (+) or exclude(-) which I find really simple but at the same time affective.





Enterprise software vendor Tibbr has an excellent filtering system, where people can easily set up their own streams based on a combination of parameters such as subject, sender or time. You can give each stream a name, set up the rules and viola, they are available for a list on the left side of the screen.





Bottlenose provides a similar way of creating your own custom streams, but takes it step further by offering "guides" to help you set them up. Bottlenose's filters can also be extremely advanced, offering metrics-based parameters such as number of posts or relevance. These folks are way ahead of the game and I hope that enterprise software vendors start to offer similar analytics-based filters.





Socialtext provides a nice balance of powerful vs easy to use filters, enabling people to select from a set of choices at the top of the stream. I particularly like the "My Conversations" filter which displays just the threads started by you and the ones you've responded to.





What's Popular?

One of the main issues with streams is that information often flows past the bottom of the screen long before people see it. To help with this streams need to offer sorting options other than just chronological.

Facebook does this by providing a choice of Most Recent or Top Stories. The problem is perhaps 3 people on the planet have any idea what logic goes into actually making something a "top story". According to Facebook help "We determine whether something is a top story based on lots of factors, including your relationship to the person who posted the story, how many comments and likes it got, what type of story it is, etc." I really like this in theory, but often question the results.

NewGator has a nice feature where you can display the activity stream as a heatmap. Colour coding is used to display the most active conversations, which you can then click on to drill down into more detail. The heatmap view can also be refined with standard filters such as author, hashtag, etc. The combination of the two methods makes this a very powerful and also fun way to view the stream.





Another options is to sort streams based on the number of Likes that posts have.

Automated Filtering Via Analytics

Some enterprise software vendors are already implementing "smart filtering" options similar to Facebook's Top Stories mentioned above. For example, Jive Software has a "What Matters" stream which their help describes as "an engine that collects and analyzes user activity in the community to recommend useful content, people, and places to individual users, and reports trending content and people. The Recommender looks at business relationships, user expertise, and areas of interest based on a user's behavior in the community to suggest relevant content that Jive knows a user has not yet seen." IBM has told me they are working on similar smart filters for IBM Connections which will leverage the power of their Cognos analytics tools.

I do think automated smart filtering has potential to help people navigate huge amounts of content. However, I remain skeptical about an algorithm's ability to decide what I should, or more importantly what I want to see, especially at a specific time or context. If algorithms are going to be used (which at this point we know they will) then I hope ("fingers crossed") that vendors at least allow power-users to tweak the parameters that are being used. This does not have to be rocket science. The reason I use the Zite newsreader on my iPad instead of Flipboard is that Zite provides an incredibly simple way for me to help determine which stories to display.  On the right side of each story I can say whether I like the story or not, and if I want more content from that source, that author or various tags. I'd love to see enterprise software do this as well.





Summary

I don't want people to misinterpret my latest posts as "Alan hates streams." I don't. I'm just trying to paint a realistic picture of some of the challenges the present and hopefully provide some guidance as we move forward.  Remember, there is no one right answer. Sometimes things are better all jumbled up and sometimes they are best when consumed on their own.





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I've found myself discussing the pros and cons of activity streams a lot lately. While streams, or news feeds, can be a great way to display information and encourage conversations, they can also be a huge contributor to information overload.

I'm sure your first reaction is to quote Clay Shirky's famous "There's no such thing as information overload, only filter failure" line.

Yes, filtering is EXTREMELY important, and the combination of manual controls, automated filtering via analytics, and crowd-sourced curation can be very helpful in managing overload. But shouldn't we question the root cause of the issue, putting too much information into the stream in the first place?

My favourite way to illustrate this point is the following scene from the 1984 movie Ghost Busters:

Dr. Egon Spengler: There's something very important I forgot to tell you.
Dr. Peter Venkman: What?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Don't cross the streams.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Why?
Dr. Egon Spengler: It would be bad.
Dr. Peter Venkman: I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, "bad"?
Dr. Egon Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
Dr Ray Stantz: Total protonic reversal.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Right. That's bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.



While I'm not worried about total protonic reversal, I am concerned that having status updates, file sharing, Q&A, news links, CRM updates, social media feeds, workflow approvals, ERP orders, support tickets, polls/surveys and a dozen other sources of information all piped into the same stream can make social software almost unusable.

Of course I understand the potential benefits of making information available to a large audience by "freeing it from it's application silos." Enabling people to discover content and colleagues that can help them with their jobs is a clearly a wonderful thing. I'm just not sure that taking information from a dozen different systems and squeezing it all into one stream is going to be the nirvana everyone is hoping for.  

That said, at the end of the movie crossing the streams was what saved the day. So perhaps as activity streams mature they will be way to conquer the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man of enterprise collaboration.

Who you gonna call?


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Earlier this week I attended MicroStrategy World in Miami, Florida. If you're not familiar with MicroStrategy, they are one of the largest vendors of Business Intelligence (BI) software, competing with products such as SAP Business Objects and IBM Cognos for reporting and analysis of data. MicroStrategy was founded in 1989 by CEO Michael Saylor and COO Sanju Bansal. I did not get to meet Michael, but did have the pleasure of speaking with Mr. Bansal and found him to be an excellent presenter and spokesperson for his company.

While BI is not my area of focus, the reason MicroStrategy was interested in speaking with me is that they are increasing their focus on "social". This makes sense, since analyzing Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites is a hot area right now. However, MicroStrategy made it clear that they are taking a different approach than others in this space. They are not doing things like "sentiment analysis" where you can monitor social networks for mentions of your brand. Instead, they looking to create the largest and most powerful application for analyzing the data "Liked" by people in Facebook. Throughout the various keynotes and sessions they referred to Facebook as the largest CRM database ever created and stroked our imagination at what information could be gleamed from it.

In addition to "social", MicroStrategy has put a HUGE focus on mobile applications. They don't see mobile as an afterthought or an "alternative access method", they see mobile (especially iPads) as a fundamental driver in the adoption of Business Intelligence. After a few days of playing with their various iPad apps, I can tell you they have hit a home run. Just look at these screenshots. The iPad's UI and interactions (touching, zooming, scrolling) brings data to life in a fun and interactive way that you just don't get on a regular computer screen. Several customers at the event talked about how the MicroStrategy iPad app is enabling their company to create and share information in ways they never have before.

So let's look at how they have combined the two areas of "social" and "mobile" and do a quick review of their Wisdom iPad application.

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Facebook But Were Afraid To Ask (or share!)

Wisdom is a free iPad application that makes it simple to drill down into information shared by millions of Facebook fans. Currently the application has data from about 5 million people and MicroStrategy says that is growing by about 100,000 people a day. The app has two main functions, the first allows you to analyze and compare the information from almost half a billion Facebook Page Likes. The second provides you detailed statistics about your personal Facebook network.

A Marketing Managers Dream

Have you ever wanted to know about the differences in Coke vs. Pepsi fans? IBM vs. Microsoft? Yankees vs. Red Sox? With Wisdom you can. Here are a few examples that I had fun creating:

Harry Potter fans vs. Twilight


Justin Bieber fans vs. Sting


Wisdom has a powerful set of filters that enable you to drill down into the data from many angles. For example, below I investigated the differences in TV shows Liked specifically by Canadian men and women ages 22-45. Interesting that The Big Bang Theory is the first show to both lists.





Overall I'm extremely impressed with the Wisdom application. The iPad UI is easy to use and provides some really powerful features. I do wish you could select multiple pages when doing comparisons. For example, I wanted to look at The Simpsons vs. Family Guy, but each had several choices listed. The same thing happened for Playstation vs. Xbox. To get a more accurate picture I think they need to enable you to compare multiple Facebook Fan pages into a single query.

So while the free iPad application is a lot of fun (and useful) the real power for brands comes in the form of MicroStrategy Wisdom Enterprise Edition. This version allows brands to create more advanced dashboards, engage their fans with personalized deals and even synchronize data with CRM systems. Of course the first thing that probably pops into your mind is concerns around security and privacy. Rather that get into those details here, I'll direct you to the MicroStrategy Wisdom FAQ.


Getting Personal With Your Network

Switching gears from analyzing Facebook Fan Pags, Wisdom also allows you to drill into details about your personal network of Facebook friends. For example, you can discover the most popular posts, interests, activities and places your friends visit. Filters allow you to slice and dice this data in a variety of ways.

The default page named Feed, shows you the Most Popular posts made by your friends in the last 7 days. (I'm not displaying a screenshot to honour my friends' privacy) Popular is defined by the total combined number of comments and likes. You can filter this view by geography, age, gender and relationship status. Of course the first thing I did was look at what the single females 30-40 in Toronto were posting about! As another proof point of how good this iPad application is, you can click on a person's name to go to their Facebook profile or click on the text of the post to open the specific conversation. There are two enhancements I'd like to see: 1) The ability to exclude specific people 2) Click to sort the various columns.

The second page named Friends, allows you to look at things like who's the most active, which people you interact with the most, the people who comment/Like your posts and the people who's posts you most frequently Like or comment on. I found this to be very interesting data, but again wish I could sort the various columns.

The Interests, Places and Events tabs provide a look into a lot of the details of your network. For example, the most checked into location amongst my network was SFO airport. Again (broken record) I wish you could sort the columns. It would also be nice to be able to dive deeper into specific stats, for example I can see the number of people that checked into SFO but now who they are.

The final page "About Me" is perhaps the most fun to play around with. You can look at the demographics of your network: (gees, most of my friends are younger than me and married, surprise surprise)



You can see the people you interact with the most frequently: (posts, comments and likes, but not message)



and you can see your overall activity. Notice that if you touch anywhere on the chart, details pop up.




I've really enjoyed playing with the Wisdom application. I use the word playing on purpose, because for me this was fun, not business. However, that's smart on MicroStrategy's part as this shows the power of what their platform can do and will entice marketing people to contact them to find out about Wisdom Enterprise Edition. Wisdom is one of the most impressive iPad applications I've seen. I hope I have the opportunity to work with MicroStrategy on ways this technology can be applied to internal enterprise collaboration platforms.


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You can't attend a conference or webinar these days without hearing how social, location, mobile, gamification, cloud and big data are currently the most influential trends in enterprise software. Of these, location is currently getting the least amount of attention, but that may be changing soon. Take for example Tibco, who have just announced some location features to their Tibbr product.

So what role should location play in enterprise software? I think the best way to answer that is to start by saying what I don't want it to be... "FourSquare for the Enterprise." I can't see companies wanting employees to compete over being Leader of the Lunchroom or Ruler of the Water Cooler. However, I do think a great deal of value could be derived from adding location as a layer of metadata stored with objects that are part of a business processes. Those objects could be things like people, customer records, inventory, steps in a workflow, status updates, etc.

If location was stored with objects, that data could then be used to filter information, just like how facets such as time and author are used today. This could lead to location-specific activity streams, similar to how Google+ provides a "Nearby" stream in their mobile apps. Location is not just reserved for people though. Say a new customer prospect was entered into your CRM system and that record was broadcast into your activity stream along with the customer's location. If an employee was subscribed to updates based on that location, they may be able to help close the deal.

In other words, location is an important data point that could be used to reduce the rapidly increasing amount of information that is being pushed into activity streams.

Another way location could help is to assist employees as they travel. Imagine visiting a customer location or remote office and having your social software automatically provide you information about the facility such as where to park, maps to the visitor center, places to eat and a list of local colleagues you're connected with (or others like you that are visiting) all based on knowing your location. Take it a step further and imagine if the system automatically informed your people working there that you were visiting and they could reach out to you to try and meetup.

There are many ways in which location can play a pivotal role in helping navigate the sea of information we're all drowning in. Based on conversations I've had with several vendors I know we're going to see a lot of advancements in this area. If you're a software vendor and you're not working on this already, you better start as you're already way behind.





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You may have noticed that I'm really excited about the plethora of new team project management solutions that are popping up such as Do, Strides, Asana, Wunderkit, Podio, Trello and many others. The reason I like them is that they enable colleagues to do more than just share status updates and links and instead help teams actually focus on getting work done. Today Producteev announced updates to all their clients, integration with TaskRabbit, printable task lists and more.



Producteev uses the term workspaces as the top level way of organizing a project. Each workspace has members and contains tasks. Tasks have all the expected features such as prioritization, due dates, assignments, etc. Tasks can have sub-tasks, but they are just simple checklists and don't have all the features that main tasks have. Producteev provides a nice activity stream that displays all the events taking place in the workspace and allows conversations to take place around each event.

Producteev is available on the web, via clients for Windows or Mac, and as applications on iOS and Android devices. Pricing is per workspace, not per user. Workspaces for only 1 or 2 people are free, while paid workspaces start at $20/month and discounts apply as the number of workspaces increases.


My POV

• While the "pay for what you use" pricing model sounds attractive, I think business buyers may prefer a single time charge and not have to worry about how many projects they are setting up. Of course per user pricing can get confusing when you mix both internal employees and external people like customers or partners. To solve this some SaaS vendors are charging per employee but allowing unlimited external users.
• Differentiation in this space is going to be difficult, as most vendors are offering similar features and user experiences.
• Producteev's integration with TaskRabbit sounds interesting, but I'd like to hear stories about how customers are actually using it before I'm convinced this will be useful, especially in business use-cases.
• I know one of the fundamental design points for these tools is simplicity, but I believe that integration with business systems such as CRM, ECM, HR, etc. is going to be critical in making them truly useful. After all, if you're going to manage a project don't you want to link back to the resources (people, pages, files, customer records, inventory, etc.) involved in the project?

What do you think?  Are you using a team-based project management tool to help you and your colleagues get work done?

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It's 8:00am Monday morning and I'm surrounded by thousands of friends in a ballroom at the Dolphin hotel in Orlando. The lights dim and BAM we're acoustically assaulted by the blaring sounds of OK Go performing Here It Goes Again as they kick off Lotusphere 2012. From that opening salvo to the final remarks some two hours later we were treated to one of the best overall Lotusphere opening sessions.

Below are some highlights of the event followed by my observations and feedback.

First up was Alistair Rennie, General Manager IBM Collaboration Solutions. Alistair established the pace of this year's event (short segments) by spending just a few minutes on opening highlights, including announcing that 750 university students were in attendance representing 20 different educational institutes. He then introduced this year's special guest speaker, Michael J. Fox. Michael's presentation focused on living in the moment and how this enables you to do things you never could accomplish if you over-think it. He tied his talk into the Lotusphere theme by explaining how important the online community was to him when we was diagnosed with Parkinson's, and how he established The Michael J. Fox Foundation to be an service where people could share their stories, learn from each other and know that they are not alone.

Over the next 90 minutes a parade of executive speeches, product demonstrations and customer stories combined to paint a very compelling picture of IBM's vision of Social Business. Some of the morning's product announcements included:

• IBM Connections Embedded Experiences - Via industry standards including OpenSocial and activitystrea.ms, IBM has taken activity streams to the next level by going beyond mere status updates and link sharing to offer integration with core business systems. For example, an order in SAP could be displayed as a post in the stream, then filled out and approved right inline, eliminating the need to switch back and forth between multiple applications. I'll be covering this in more detail in a separate blog post.
• IBM Connections Mail - In the next version of Connections people will be able to access their Lotus Domino or Microsoft Exchange based email and calendar right within Connections. This is not a new email system nor a native messaging application such as the one found in Facebook.
  
  

• Two announcements were made around Lotus Notes. The first is that next version of Lotus Notes, named Social Edition (bleh!) will include a new Home Page featuring the same activity stream that is available to Connections users on the web. This new feature will require an IBM Connection server, but the pricing and licensing for that has not yet been announced. Second, a new web browser plugin will allow people to access Domino applications via the web instead of requiring a full Notes client. The initial beta will be for IE and FF on Windows. When I get more details on the plugin's features, limitations and requirements I'll post about it.
• LotusLive is being rebranded IBM Smart Cloud for Social Business and will become a more integrated part of the larger IBM initiative around Smart Cloud.
• IBM Docs - Provides online document editing similar to Google Docs, where people can work together in real time to co-author content. Authors can even assign specific sections for colleagues to work on.

• IBM Customer Experience - this impressive package is used by companies to infuse their brand's web presence with social features, drag and drop content, videos and more.
• Mobile applications of all shapes and sizes where shown, including a prototype of the next Connections mobile app for iPad that has a Flipboard like experience.

The closing story was presented by Dr. Jeffery Burns of Children's Hospital Boston. It was a heart warming tale of how they are using IBM Connections to redefine the way doctors are educated, share information, work together and ultimately save children's lives. I'd love to see this as a TEDTalk.

My Point Of View

A few weeks ago I wrote about how the big software vendors are catching up to and even passing the startups when it comes to social software. I'm sticking with that statement and this week IBM did a lot to support my case.

• The keynote was informative, engaging and even inspirational. The pace was excellent and I was quite surprised how quickly 2 hours went by. I do feel the demos repeated too much from last year though. Embedded experiences, online editors, customer experience web sites... we saw this all last year. The difference is this year more of the code is "real". So while I am being critical of that, I will say the demos were excellent. Hopefully next year they will show different things, perhaps focused on a few specific (vertical) business use-cases.
• While IBM may not be the first to market, the least expensive nor the easiest to install/configure/manage, one thing they certainly do well is articulate the business value of social business. Every marketing message, product demo and customer case study is focused on why and how organizations need to transform themselves into a social business to remain competitive. My mantra for a while now has been to stop talking about "being social" and to instead focus on "getting work done" and IBM appears to be on that path.
• IBM is reducing the friction caused by their own internal politics. The IBM social software platform involves technology and people from all across the company, not just a single brand. It's been interesting to meet IBMer's this week who work in every corner of the company. Lotusphere is no longer just Lotus employees. This is a really good thing for customers as they are now truly buying from IBM, not just one small division.
• I like the rebranding of LotusLive. While IBM Smart Cloud for Social Business does not exactly roll off the tonge, it does provide a great proof point of my previous comment.
• Mobile access is a first class player, not an after thought. Almost all the IBM collaboration tools are available on a wide variety of mobile devices.
• IBM is doing a great job of thinking about how analytics can transform business processes. While they are talking about cliché use-cases such as brand sentiment in social media, they are also looking at quite innovative uses of analytics in areas like improving employee retention.
• IBM is improving the commitment and recognition of business partners. During the keynote partner products were included in demos, awards were presented in several categories, the OpenNTF community was mentioned and the IBM Champion program was highlighted including having a partner come onto the main stage to kick off the demos. I understand that on Business Development day the partners were educated on several new incentive models designed to put more money in their pockets, with less red-tape and instant payments. (ex: revenue model for selling cloud offerings)
• The overall collaboration portfolio is still rather confusing. For example, when should a customer go with a hosted version of Connections vs. LotusLive? (I mean IBM Smart Cloud for Social Business) With Microsoft the message is simple, there is SharePoint, available on-premises or hosted. With IBM you have Connections, Quickr, Portal, Customer Experience Suite, LotusLive, etc., etc. Many of the partners, customers and even IBMers I've spoken with would like to see a simplification of the portfolio.
• I'm curious to know who IBM considers their largest competitor. Microsoft? Google? Best of breed combinations?
• Finally, the customer reference stories are excellent. Toronto Dominion Bank (TD), Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), Children's Hospital Boston... these and many more are wonderful case studies on companies who have dramatically improved their organizations by becoming a social business.

Overall I'm quite impressed by both the technology and the messages IBM is sending. It's great to see the entire company working together to create platforms that can help transform organizations.

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