A couple of OnePoint case studies

We have just got a couple of case studies published around our use of OnePoint, a combination of OneNote & SharePoint, and the value we are seeing from it.

The first will be published in Drug Discovery Today and you can read the pre-print here.

‘OnePoint’ – combining OneNote and SharePoint to facilitate knowledge transfer

The identification and development of novel drugs requires a multidisciplinary team of individuals whose membership changes during the lifecycle of a project. Incomplete knowledge transfer across this team can be a barrier to effective decision-making and efficient drug discovery. We have deployed a new infrastructure supporting information storage and distribution within small teams using Microsoft's SharePoint™ server technology in conjunction with the desktop application OneNote™. This delivers a user-friendly collaborative workspace that is fast, flexible and carries a low training burden. Demand from drug project teams for this ‘solution’ has now resulted in site-wide deployment to over 500 people across research.

The second case study, available here, was done in collaboration with Microsoft. In this case Microsoft also produced a video, see below, which really brings OnePoint to life (need Silverlight installed to view).

Pfizer Boosts Efficiency by 15 Percent with Easy to Use, Shared Note-Taking Program

For the past 150 years, Pfizer has pioneered the development of some of the industry’s most innovative pharmaceutical products. In 2007, Pfizer applied this “out of the box” thinking to a pilot program designed to enhance efficiency and knowledge management across project teams, and potentially speed time-to-market for new products. The pilot brought together the simple, intuitive user interface of the Microsoft® Office OneNote® 2007 note-taking program with the robust document management technology of Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007. As a result, pilot participants reported a significant decrease in the number of e-mail messages they send each day, and one group reported a 15 percent increase in efficiency. Overall, the 600 participants reported a 2 percent time savings per week, which represents a cost savings of approximately U.S.$2.25 million.

People create silo's not technology

A couple of recent posts by Thomas Van Wal, SharePoint 2007: Gateway Drug to Enterprise Social Tools, and Dion Hinchcliffe, SharePoint andEnterprise 2.0: The good, the bad and the ugly seem to have re-started the SharePoint it's not really Enterprise 2.0 meme. These are both balanced articles and I agree with a lot of the points raised in them and certainly as with any application SharePoint has its strengths and weakness's. However one of the common criticisms of SharePoint is the rapid proliferation of sites upon deployment and I can confirm this from my own experiences, that in a large enterprise, within one year you can be looking at 1000's of SharePoint sites. But is this the fault of SharePoint? No this is a failure of deployment, it is a user failure.
SharePoint is no different to any other content management system and I've seen this same issue in every large content management I've worked with. There are two main reasons this occurs, firstly if someone does not manage the structure users will proliferate folders/sites in an uncontrolled fashion. In general people simply create what they need in that moment for their project. Secondly they restrict the access permissions, the assumption is that if they don't restrict access then someone will delete it/change it. Nothing creates silo's quicker than allowing users to control permission settings.
The implication in the 'proliferation of Sharepoint sites' comments is that if the companies had implemented a 'proper' Enterprise 2.0 tool set then this would not of happened. Sorry I don't buy this. It doesn't matter what the tool is if you don't invest resources in defining structure and allow users to manage permissions then you end up with a proliferation of silo's. I've heard of the same sort of proliferation of silo's occurring within wiki's based on Socailtext and Confluence, both of which allow user to create silo'ed wiki spaces. Even when the ability to set permission is inactivated or is not available, such as in MediaWiki, then you still need invest in wiki gardening to introduce and maintain structure as the wiki grows.
In the end it is not the tools but rather that those implementing social computing need to understand what they are trying to do. I'd guess that in many of the companies where silo's have proliferated it is more because the tools were introduced by people who understand technology not people/communities. In the end the whole social computing thing is not about the technology it is about the culture. If you don't understand the culture you are trying to create then don't be surprised if you end up with a mass of silo's.

When Jo meets Charlie

'Why when I'm constantly interrupted by email alerts would I be interested in adding to my problem by installing an Instant Messenger?'

This question and other like it are answered in this new slide deck that has just been shared by John Castledine, a colleague of mine. He felt that the 'meet Charlie'/'meet Jessica' presentations had 'missed the opportunity to speak directly about WHY Enterprise 2.0 tools should be adopted widely in the workplace'. I'd agree with him and this addition to the 'meet Charlie' pantheon certainly delivers against that brief.

When Jo meets Charlie

view presentation (tags: enterprise 2.0 web km)

How valuable is tabbed browsing?

I’ve recently been helping a group of colleagues improve the way they share literature, a combination of social bookmarking (capture and archive) and RSS reader (alerting to new items of interest). Pretty simple until you realise they are all stuck using IE6 and so no tabbed browsing. They all like the idea and the simplicity of the process/workflow but when they realised that the RSS reader was web based they were concerned that the process would not work. Why? Because it meant they had to open yet another instance of IE6, they already had 4 or 5 instance open to do their work, if this was the case then they probably wouldn’t bother. I look at my work desktop and I have IE7, it’s non-standard one of the perks of being in IT, and I realised just how enabling tabbed browsing is. Once you have tabbed browsing you can live within one instance of your browser but more importantly you can configure it with multiple home pages. Now when I open my browser at the start of the day I open all the tools in the enterprise tool set and I’m ready to go. I can sympathise with my colleagues who are already opening 4 or 5 web based applications in different browser instances and here I am suggesting they add a couple more. So I’m adding another tool to the enterprise tool set and that’s a browser that supports tabbed browsing.

Weapons of Choice – Choosing the Enterprise2.0 tool kit

Having spent sometime exploring all things Web2.0 and ‘eating our own dog food’ a group of early adopter/enthusiast decided we needed to introduce Enterprise2.0 into our company. Scott had already produced the now infamous ‘meet Charlie’ presentation and we had put together ‘meet Jessica’ a version contextualised for research. With these communication tools in hand we sat down to plan our road map. The first decision was what tools should we focus on? If you look at the cloud of Web2.0 tools available it is clear you need to make some key choices. Invariably at this stage you are resource limited and you will need to show some immediate return in value if you are going at get funding support for the next step. So where to focus your time? Which tools are you going to put into your Enterprise2.0 tool kit?

At the start we chose five types of tools that would define the basic building blocks of our Enterprise2.0 tool kit. These were wiki’s, blog’s & GTDware (Social Content Creation tools) and RSS reader & social bookmarking (Social Information Management tools). Before discussing the tools we did choose it is worth explaining why we decided to not focus on social networking and mash-ups tools.

Mash-ups

We chose not to consider mash-ups for the simple reason enterprise is already well served by this type of tool. Tools like Pipeline Pilot and Business Objects are the enterprise equivalent of Yahoo pipes. They can take data from multiple sources and allow it to be transformed and manipulate and then served up in many different forms. If you look further we can consider that most of the Enterprise Information Integration (EII) tools set are in fact expert user mash-up tools. In reality this is the one area where traditional business is actually ahead of the web2.0 curve.

Social Networking

We decided not to pursue this because we did not understand what a enterprise2.0 social network was. We understood what we liked about the social sites we had joined, what value we were or were not getting from them, etc. We knew we would need a social networking solution but also could not decide if we needed a Facebook (social and fun) or a LinkedIn (professional and conservative) or something hybrid. We also had been playing with a early release of Microsoft’s Knowledge Network for SharePoint and just didn’t know how static profile information could/should integrate with tacit profile information and how best to capture it. Finally most of the tools we had chosen had a social networking component within them. We knew that if social networking turned out to be critical early on then we could always use one of these to provide a starting point. In the mean time we could continue to explore and understand what were the requirements for a Enterprise2.0 social networking tool.

Weapons of Choice

Wiki – Provides the space for collaboration and the sharing information in a structured fashion.
This was an easy one, Pfizerpedia, based on Mediawiki was already up and running. It is a great technology that just does structured wiki very well. The familiar look and feel from peoples exposure to Wikipedia certainly helps and there are a great number of useful extensions available from the open source community. Its biggest draw back is the lack of a WYSWYG editor but early adopters are happy to deal with this and will wear it as a badge of honour. Also lacking is LDAP integration. At some stage we knew we would have to resolve these limitation but at that stage our key drivers we just growing the wiki and learning how to manage it.

Blog – Provides core communications and discussion space and an obvious antidote to email.
This again was a simple choice, we had gone with Drupal early on and this had been very popular. We had this in place felt comfortable with it and had successfully got a number of group wiki’s off the ground based on it.

GTDware – Provides lightweight project management functionality to individuals and project teams.
We saw this filling a big gap currently for our colleagues. Our first thought was we wanted Basecamp or a clone. We had a look at activeCollab but it was not ready at that stage and also we had SharePoint looming into view. After much soul searching and experimentation with SharePoint we accepted that SharePoint could ideally fill this gap. Our main concern here was that SharePoint did not meet our key Web2.0 requirement i.e. it is intuitive, it takes less than 10 minutes to learn. However once you realise that it is a platform for developers and not an end user tool it makes more sense and is easier to swallow.

Social bookmarking – A simple and obvious tool that provides immediate user value solving the nightmare of browser based bookmark/favourite folder hell. It is also appeared to be simple on ramp into the world of social collaboration as you immediately can see how other people’s bookmarking can help you.
The choice here was pretty obvious. We had all been experimenting with del.icio.us and while other services offered more functions the simplicity of del.icio.us appealed, we had no hesitation in getting a clone of del.icio.us, Scuttle, up and running. This has all the core features of a social bookmarking service and does them very well. However it does not support communities and again no LDAP integration, something we would soon come to recognise as critical for wider adoption.

RSS reader – We saw RSS as the glue that holds all the tools together. This lets you bring all your activity/awareness monitoring to a single pace and eliminates the need for email distribution list though enabling the consumer to subscribe to what they need.
This proved to be a tricky area not because there was a lack of potential readers but because we realised that RSS is more than just a reader and that we would need a true enterprise solution. In the end this was where we had our first real funding provided and we went with NewsGator Enterprise Server which came with a RSS readers for the browser, desktop and the Outlook inbox.

Social Information Management tools

From the users perspective tools such as RSS readers and social bookmarking are ideally used in tandem. These tools work best in partnership and the combination provides synergistic value to the user. They provide the means where by a user can monitor and store links to the content generated by Social Content Creation tools. The RSS reader provides the user with awareness, while the social bookmarking service plays the role of memory.

Social Content Creation tools

From the user perspective tools such as wiki’s, blog’s and GTDware all provide means of content creation within a shared/social environment. The whole point of these tools is that they enable a user or group of users to generate content and make it available for consumption. Others are then able to edit, comment or act on this information.

meet Jessica

Hopefully you have already met Charlie and his good friend Charlotte, now I'd like to introduce you to Jessica.

SlideShare src="http://static.slideshare.net/swf/logo_embd.png"> View Upload your own

This is something we put together for internal use at our company. The aim was to contextualise enterprise2.0 for the research community. Where as in meet Charlie Scott illustrated the use of web2.0 tools for small and medium business, here we see what enterprise2.0 looks like inside a large company where intellectual property has to remain inside the firewall. In this case you do not always have access to the tools of choice and have to get creative with those you have available. Further the challenge is how to blend these tools together to create an integrated environment. Over the last 12 months we have been consolidating and integrating our tools set. As we move forward I will be sharing our learning's and experiences, hopefully you will find these interesting.