Posted by Rene Jansen
Wed, 26 Oct 2005 12:57:00 GMT
Today I received a nice mail from Vincent, author of the
Zesser blog. He pointed my "attention" to his posting on
Attention XML.
Attention XML follows the kind of the same methodology as bPerform does, in a sense that it monitors users behavior, to enable the easier "re-finding" of information you once read. Secondly, it enables to suggest (pro-actively) content that might be interesting for you.
His post reminded me on a topic that I wanted to discuss with you for quite some time, what I will call the Big Brother fear: Today in the Amsterdam subway, I bumped into Maureen, a nice girl who used to sing in one of my former bands. I hadn't spoken to her for quite some time, so we had a nice chat and a good laugh. After a while I told her about bPerform and what we try to achieve.
When she learned from me that bPerform will kind of monitor what you do to be able to pro-actively guide your attention and focus to information that might be interesting for you, she reacted like "oh, mmm, so, my manager will have a powerful means to monitor what I am doing? I would hate that!".
I explained to her that the objective is definitely not to "monitor and punish". I heard about this fear earlier, and this fear is actually an important reasons why we offer our product in combination with training and coaching of both the knowledge workers and their managers. If managers should use web2.0 to monitor what their people are doing, they will reduce the willingness of users to share information in a web2.0 way, and by that, remove all the advantages that web2.0 offers to all of us.
During this discussion I realised two things:
1) The Big Brother fear should be addressed in both the software and the marketing communication of our product
2) that our product is most suitable for organisations with "new types of managers". The former "command and control" managers will not realise any benefits with web2.0, but I am sure the new generation managers that understand the essence of the knowledge economy will not use bPerform to control their people, and by that, will benefit greatly from improved information sharing, community building and happier employees...
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Posted by Rene Jansen
Tue, 25 Oct 2005 13:00:00 GMT
Just bumped into a nice article on
Frankwatching, a nice blog on web2.0. This describes exactly what we are doing, we need to work on our PR asap, that's for sure :)
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Posted by Rene Jansen
Fri, 21 Oct 2005 12:54:00 GMT
"Social browsing" and "web 2.0" all around the news last week. Even my general management newsletter
Fem (sorry folks, in Dutch...) had an article on web2.0, stating that a new internet hype is starting up. But the big news was of course the availability of the (pre-alfa-developer-not ready-be-carefully-expect-bugs...) new social web browser,
Flock.
Flock is in my humble opinion the next generation browser: it makes posting to your blog a breeze, it included bookmark sharing via
delicious, and is a pretty OK browser as well. It is based on the same engine as firefox.
So I downloaded it today. Installing was, as always, very easy on the Mac: just drag the executable to my application folder and done. Started it... Mmmm, took quite some time to startup. But after a minute, my good old powerbook showed the new browser. Smart, on the default homepage that loaded, an explanation of the basic functionalities and how to configure the social stuff like blogs and delicious. Configuring delicious was easy and yep, there were my delicious bookmarks, right in my favorite menu. Well done guys!
More problems with the blog configuration. I tried to link this justmy2p blog account, it connected to blogger, I gave my username and password, but then... Five minutes of that nice colorful skippy ball (don't know how you guys call it officially, but you know what I mean right) indicating that my Mac was doing "something"... But five minutes is a long time, so I forced the application to quit, and tried again. Same problem. So, that still needs some improvement...
Conclusion: I think tools like Flock do definitely have a future. Of course this was a pre-release so with bugs and performance issues, but they have my vote!
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Posted by Rene Jansen
Mon, 10 Oct 2005 12:52:00 GMT
Looking around on the internet I see more and more attention for web 2.0 or the so called for social software. Many blogs are discussing tagging, and quite some people are getting used to working with sites like
Flickr,
delicious,
furl or
last.fm.
The main concept of these site is: a low barrier way of sharing information with others. For flickr you share photo's, with delicious and furl you share bookmarks, with last.fm it is about music. Just to make sure: last.fm is not just another napster / kazaa like sharing environment, no, instead you only share your favorite playlists: what music and what artists do you like.
Looking at the vast amout of users who wanna share tagged "things", it seems reasonable that we indeed grow more and more to a knowledge economy where information is the means of exchange, as economics would say. You could say: "knowledge is power" is old and boring, "tagged sharing" is hot.
If I'm right by saying that tagged sharing is hot, we are very much on the right track with bPerform. Only thing I hope is that we will be quick enough to win our share of this interesting market. Why should I doubt? Well, most recent development regarding social software is of course
ning. Ning is the new venture from Marc Andreessen, remember, co-founder of Netscape, who brought web browsers to the mass.
Ning offers a kind of meta-meta approach to social software: it offers a social software based environment to create... social software! The trashhold for creating shared environments is vastly reduced with ning. They have an interesting
weblog about ning as well. Interesting!
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Posted by Rene Jansen
Tue, 20 Sep 2005 12:48:00 GMT
Last week I was on a friends birthday party. I chatted for a while with his sister, who was considering to do a PhD research. She asked me whether I felt
my PhD research had been beneficial or not. I thought about her question. I did spent quite some nights, weekends and oh yeah, days of course, on my research. I obliged myself to work every evening at least half an hour, even if I was tired and wanted to relax, and I permitted myself 2 evenings of fun per week (like playing in my band). As we all know now, I managed to finalize my PhD research in about 2 years, doing it in part time next to my commercial job (again, thanks to the help from all collegues and students from the University of Amsterdam who supported me, and thanx as well to Capgemini, Bortiboll Communications and Bit-IC who funded part of the research).
So you could say, I could have done a lot of other things during those late night hours. Was it worth it? Yes, definitely, I said to my friend's sister. I think I owe quite some interesting projects I worked on over the last years (i.e. the
DHL web site) to my PhD thesis and the authority my research gives me.
However, I think if I could do it again, I'm not sure if I would go again for a PhD thesis, or rather write a business book (like I wrote earlier with
Martijn Hoogeveen and later one with
Monique van Berkel). It is easier to write a business book, since you can focus on your message and the practical relevance of your message, instead of the focus on scientific relevance. And suddenly a thought came to mind: it is about time to write my next book! I should start writing about my bPerform thoughts. About the business impact of Web2.0. What are the problems that managers of knowledge intensive firms run into. And what are the problems that individual knowledge workers run into? I realised that the current books on knowledge intensive organisations don't cover the whole story I want to tell (I realized myself how difficult it is to find good literature for teaching my courses at the University of Amsterdam, remember, the course where we started a
nice blog about all aspects of managing information and knowledge).
So, OK, let me think: I plan to interview, let's say, 20 managers and 20 individual knowledge workers. And I am going to ask them questions like:
- how important is knowledge for you to survive, and to create competitve advantage?
- what are the main challenges facing you as a knowledge intensive firm?
- how do you currently manage knowledge? What goes well, what needs improvement?
- how do you benefit on a strategic level from ideas and inspiration of your knowledge workers?
- what support do internal and external systems offer you, and is their support satisfying?
- how do you deal with the fact that knowledge workers are professionals that want to manager their own live and their own work, and that they often share knowledge in peer groups outside the company
And I realise myself that these questions are just a beginning, I need to think more about the real important questions. I need to define some objectives, hypotheses, a research framework... Damn, it's gona be another PhD thesis!! But... With a more practical focus, although I consider to write some scientific articles based on this research as well. Cool! This gives me energy! And it is important for all of us to better understand what is happening in the knowledge economy, so let's go for it! Any suggestions for questions? For people to interview? Just let me know....
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Posted by Rene Jansen
Thu, 15 Sep 2005 12:47:00 GMT
The nice thing about posting to this blog, is that interesting people read it and send me emails, specially since google introduced its
blog search software. Today I recieved an email from Isaac Garcia. You might know Isaac from the
centraldesktop blog. I quote his profile information here: "Isaac co-founded Upgradebase in 1997, a leading product data provider to the Computer and Consumer Electronics industry; and Vendorbase in 1999, a B2B Marketplace for Computer Resellers. Both companies were acquired by CNET Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: CNET) in 2002. During my 3 year tenure at CNET, I served as a Director of North America Enterprise Sales for CNET Channel."
Isaac told me about his new initative,
Central Desktop. I visited their site today. It is an interesting collaboration environment based on Wiki. What I like about it is the thougth of a semi-structured, semi-unstructured shared environment, a bit like
basecamp, but then completely different :) They use the nice pay off: "reduce team spam". And I think most people in corporate environments, working on major international projects, recognises the spam in their email boxes. And Web2.0 is indeed a perfect way to improve team communication and collaboration, without increasing the number of mails in your inbox.
What I feel, looking at centraldesktop or Basecamp, is the huge need for better collaboration suites than the main providers like Microsoft offer us. So, join the group of people who make the online collaboration world a better place to be, join centraldesktop or bPerform or any other of your favorites, just quit using old fashioned cooperation tools and environments, just wake up and have fun, join web2.0!
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Posted by Rene Jansen
Mon, 12 Sep 2005 12:46:00 GMT
Do you see any difference between this post and previous posts? You should. This post is made with a veeeery big smile on my face. Let me tell you: about 1,5 year ago I had to exchange my lovely titanium powerbook for a dull IBM (nothing wrong with it, a good laptop, but no real identity and a pretty dull image) since Capgemini forbid me to work on my preferred platform. Policy rules and standardisation. So you think a standardised platform helps? I was working on a Capgemini project in brussels for DHL, when my IBM laptop broke down. So, I went down to Capgemini Belgium, about 250 meters from the DHL building where I was based. I showed them my laptop and asked if they could help me. I felt lucky, since I could see a stack of exactly the same laptops behind the service desk. The joy of standardisation. But, it wasn't it good as it seemed.They felt sorry to say, but since I was working for Capgemini Netherlands they couldn't help me, there was no international SLA to help me...
But now the good news: today I configured my good old powerbook again. What a joy, MacOS 10.4 is excellent. I like spotlight, I like the dashboard, I like the rss feature in Safari, I like it all... Mmm... Sorry, I just got carried away enjoying to work with apple again. If you are an apple user, you know what I mean. If you are not, you will not know, and might never understand what I mean. Then, you just better ignore this post, I promise the next posts will be less promo again :)
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Posted by Rene Jansen
Thu, 08 Sep 2005 12:44:00 GMT
You might think, wow, normally Rene posts several times a week to this blog, and now it has been weeks... Is he alright? Is that startup alright? Yep... Alright... The only thing that happened is that I started again with a consultancy job for a few days a week, a startup needs some cash flow of course. And what I already foresaw: it is hard to keep focus on bPerform if you are in consultancy again... However, the good news is that I had again some very good interviews with banks and informal investors, and I feel like being pretty close to a good deal, a deal that should enable the full flash focus of my two brothers in arms. And that's very good news!
Secondly, I am again teaching a nice course at the university of amsterdam. Needs to keep my thinking and inspiration alive, hey! For those of you speaking (or at least understanding) the beautiful Dutch language (smurf language as my UK friends call it), in a few days you might check the blog we started around the theme of the course:
management of immaterial values. The students will post their thoughts on the knowledge economy, the information economy, tagging, and all those nice subjects that we are making money and fun with these days :)
So, will update you shortly on some news coming up around bPerform, will keep ya in the loop!
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Posted by Rene Jansen
Mon, 22 Aug 2005 12:41:00 GMT
It is always nice if you are working on an idea for months and months, and suddenly someone knows a good label for what you are doing... Mark pointed me via his
delicious social bookmark system to some nice links regarding Web 2.0
Until now, I stayed far away from those terms that people tried to apply to new versions or new trends on the internet. To me it isn't really about terms, it is about the underlying trends. However, this Web 2.0 label is pretty much covering what we are working on with bPerform.
What is web 2.0?
We can define web 2.0 compared to the web 1.0 (as we all know it) as:
- Many to Many
Whereas the web 1.0 was mostly a few publishers and many readers, with web 2.0 the barriers to publish information, react on information, discuss information are so low, that nearly all users are contributors (or: publishers) as well. This trend started with the commoditization of Content Management systems, but really started of with blogging and wiki.
- Syndication and Aggregation
Publishers of information create little chunks of information, that can easily be distributed via media like RSS. By distinguishing between presentation and content, the medium (XHTML) is no longer the message (XML). This goes as well for applications and services. Applications are opened up to link into them and develop new or additional services. Amazon and eBay for example, provide application programming interfaces to their core operational systems, enabling other companies to offer new services (i.e. check out the successful Andale service for eBay). Because information and applications are opened up, you can aggregate content and functionality to offer new services. This links into the core of "the digital economy" or "new economy": increase the value of content by enabling reuse through bundling.
- From static information to dynamic knowledge
Whereas the web 1.0 was filled with static content, hidden in HTML pages, web 2.0 is dynamic. Users are continuously tagging information, bundling information, discussing what happens in the world and on the web via blogs or flickr, creating an always changing dynamic snapshot of the world we are living in.
Now assume, we bring these ideas of web 2.0 to the corporate environment. That is exactly what bPerform is about... So, we have a new descriptor of our business. Tiny little issue: most people don't know what web 2.0 is all about... So, spread the word! Send out those links, stories and best practices :)
Read more about web 2.0 via
social bookmarks (yep, that is meta-meta you know, reading about web 2.0 via a web 2.0 medium as delicious ;)
Remark: you will find out that most stories about web 2.0 are still about technology and how to make it work. It is up to you and me to
bring these ideas to the business environment!
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Posted by Rene Jansen
Wed, 17 Aug 2005 12:40:00 GMT
We all know some people try to break all rules, and get rich without working. I read a lovely
scam the scammer story this morning. Hilarious! Have fun :-)
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