Who came up with the notion of a “Process Map”? Who decided that all knowledge workers were nothing but overpaid, posturing, gossiping poor excuses for robots?

They begin by saying things like “Walk me through your process.”

Process does exist, and there are some instances in the “white-collar” world where people follow a specific unchanging protocol. But, in reality, a company does not spend most of its money on these kinds work flows. The people that do these highly repetitive tasks are not paid very well. And for many companies, it is cheaper to pay people $25K a year than it is to buy an automated system.

If you have a degree, you are not doing these kinds of work flows. Or at least, they only make up a small minority of what you do.

You still need to share information with a broad audience, you could still benefit from powerful communication tools, like internal blogs and web based project management tools like Basecamp.

But instead, you are surrounded by IT people who think that the first step in solving all your problems is to gather user requirements, and somewhere, try to find a robotic task or an assembly line process that can be automated.

IT isn’t building you the right tools because they are not asking you the right questions.

My struggle is trying to work out how to shock IT into thinking in a different way about how to help.

You can tell people about agile development techniques until you are blue in the face. You can suggest that they read 37signal’s amazing book - getting real. But sometimes, actually often, the message does not sink in.

A Riddle

I’m going to try a different approach. A different way of showing that asking about process and work flows is actually asking the wrong question. OK, so here’s the riddle.

3 guys are on a business trip. They work for Walmart, so they are forced to share a room. Executives at Walmart really do have to share a room when they are on the road. When they arrive at the motel, the manager is in the back, and the clerk incorrectly tells the business travellers that the room costs $30, or $10 each.

The guys each pay their $10 and go up to their room.

The manager comes back from her break and realizes that the clerk has over charged the guys for the room. The clerk should have charged only $25.

The manager tells the clerk to go upstairs and give the guys back the extra $5.

The clerk goes to the room with 5 one dollar bills. Because the clerk can’t figure out how to split $5 into 3 ways, the clerk decides to give each of the 3 business travellers back $1, and pocket the remaining $2.

Now, here’s the riddle:

The business travellers originally paid $30 or $10 each. After the clerk gave them back $1, they each ended up paying $9.

3 X 9 = 27, so the 3 travellers paid $27,

27 plus the $2 in the clerk’s pocket is $29.

What happened to the extra dollar?

After you have figured this out, realize that your assumptions, and the questions they lead you to can instantly get you off on the wrong track.

Instead of assuming that knowledge workers have a process that needs automating, or a work flow that needs controlling, ask what they do. Maybe they do not need an automation tool. Maybe they need a communication tool. Maybe they need things to help them be more creative.

Practically, creative knowledge workers might need tools like wikis, blogs and customized APIs to legacy systems. Specifically, that means the kind of APIs that allow the knowledge workers to build mashups.

These kinds of tools exist on the open Internet, but so far, these tools do not exist within the enterprise.

I think they don’t exist because IT isn’t asking the right questions.

The use of blogs is exploding, yet few large companies are making use of them as a tool to power better internal communications.

What does it mean to use internal enterprise blogs? What is the business reason? How can blogs help companies?

The presentation above aims to make a CEO level business case for how and why most comapnies can benefit from the use of enterprise blogs. The presentation was derived from a talk I gave at the 2006 Glibane conference in San Francisco.

Yup! On May 15, 2006, a full eight days ago, I wrote a story about Time magazine starting to use Sphere’s amazing search engine.

Now, eight days later… TechCrunch and Susan Mernit have finally caught up. ;)

OK. So it isn’t often that I get to break a story, and especially break a story ahead of such big name blogs. I hope you will forgive me for dancing a little jig.

And with a great shop like Sphere, it’s nice to be part of getting them some much deserved attention.

“Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.”

– Howard Aiken

Thanks to Nivi for this one. Nivi points to Marc Hedlund as his source.

I found a great blog tonight: Boasso on Business run by Ken Boasso.

It’s a from the trenches view of generating revenue for Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors, and certainly worth checking out.

Here’s one of Ken’s pieces of advice if you are selling software:

re-purpose the company’s marketing efforts to stress the services as business process solutions (as opposed to technically-oriented tools)

Ken is exactly right. In the case of Web Office solutions, companies are not going to buy blogs or wikis. Instead, they are going to buy something that is geared exactly towards their business problems.

I work in a firm that offers consulting services and I am currently leading an effort to deploy an internal blogging solution. However, I never tried to convince executive management to buy into blogs. Instead, I looked at what we do, as a consulting firm, and convinced them that we need web based tools to communicate about subjects that directly relate to our business. We need People Pages, Project Pages, and Client Pages.

To use Ken’s terminology, the blogs were described internally as business process solutions.

More people are searching for the word “blog” than “wiki”, “email” or “Excel”, according to Google trends.

For the future of enterprise software, that has some big implications.

With this kind of general population search mind-share, participation based productivity tools such as blogs and wikis are inevitably going to enter the enterprise. The advent of Web Office is inevitable.

If you haven’t checked out Sphere yet, you need to.

Sphere is a mathematical search and semantic algorithm applied to the blogosphere. Sphere analyzes what any web page is talking about and then finds similar blog content.

They have been out for only two weeks and the success is pouring in.

Time magazine has already added Sphere to their website. For an example, check out this article on last night’s speech by the President.

But it is Sphere’s real time applications that are really amazing. Sphere gives you a tool for quickly finding out how much people are saying about a given topic right now.

If you are a Hedge Fund manager, if you are any kind of equity or credit manager, you need to start using Sphere NOW!

Check out this example of Sphere’s range engine on a search for General Motors:

For fund managers, the point is the spike. If you check GM daily, you can see there was a spike around 4/10. Maybe that’s around an earnings release, so it’s not a big deal. However, if that’s not the reason, something else is going on. Maybe something that will impact the stock price.

With bloggers, you do not have hundreds of journalists; you have tens of millions. The chance that bloggers will break any piece of news is increasing. And we all know that news impacts financial markets.

Sphere has an API. I am sure it won’t be long before there are all sorts of live content mashups available that show you want people are suddenly starting to talk about.

Sphere has a bunch of other cool tools, including a related media and featured blogs.

The founders are Martin Remy, Steve Nieker and Tony Conrad.

BTW, a few posts ago, in response to my article on How to start a good business blog, Easton Ellsworth asked about how people track what’s being said about their blogs. He also provided some great tips. My guess is that Sphere is going to be a valuable addition to the list.

I was checking out Google’s fancy new tool, Google Trends.

Just for kicks, I compared Movable type (MT), WordPress, TypePad, Live Journal, and Blogspot. Here are the results:

Blogging Software Battle for Mind Share

Matt, Toni, congratulations on doing such a great job of capturing the public’s imagination.

My take on this: Automattic should be delighted. Sixapart should be concerned. Why should they be concerned? Both SixApart and WordPress are doing all the things you need to create a community around your product. Check out Guy Kawasaki’s great article “The Art of Creating a Community” for more details.

Both WordPress and SixApart do everything that Guy recommends. Here’s Guy’s list:

• Create something worth building a community around.


• Identify and recruit your thunderlizards—immediately!


• Assign one person the task of building a community.


• Give people something concrete to chew on.


• Create an open system.


• Welcome criticism.


• Foster discourse.


• Publicize the existence of the community

So why is WordPress succeeding and Movable Type losing steam? I think there are multiple reasons. SixApart has MT, TypePad and LiveJournal to focus on. Automattic has one code base, and that’s it. So, focus is clearly part of it. WordPress is open-source and MT is not. That’s another part of the explanation. However, I there is a more significant reason.

The WordPress architecture allows for a wider range of participation from their community. WordPress and MT are both blogging tools with plug-in architecture. That means that a community of hackers can easily contribute to both systems. But, WordPress has made it easier for less technical hackers and designers to contribute. The difference is subtle, but the WordPress team has made it almost iPod-easy to participate in designing how a WordPress blog looks and feels.

WordPress has Themes. A Theme is a collection of templates and style sheets that describe a blog. MT has something similar in their Styles, with their Style Library and their StyleCatcher plugin.

What’s the difference? You be the judge:

To be sure, TypePad is still a much larger site than WordPress, as these results from Alexaholic show.

.

Here are a few other interesting results from Google Trends.

Open Source Projects - WordPress is starting to show up on the radar.

Potential Enterprise Class Web Office Platforms

There are a few names that have not started to show up extensively. Joyent makes an appearance, Traction Software isn’t yet on the radar, and the full capability of Blogtronix is still in stealth mode. I have seen bits and pieces of all three and been increadibly impressed.

Big Players - Not sure this says a lot, but it is interesting:

The State of Ruby on Rails

As I have said before, my guess is that the most successful Web Office tools will be built using Ruby on Rails. Whenever I meet leaders from the Ruby and Ruby on Rails community, I get a sense of what it must have been like for Steve Jobs to have walked into Xerox PARC in 1976.

Ruby on Rails is as Agile as you get. Think behavior driven development, pair-programming, domain specific languages, scaffolds, OO and a brilliant, confident focus on Getting Real. Guys like Dave Thomas, Jason Hoffman, and David Young are some of the smartest guys in the room.

So…. what does Google Trends have to say about Ruby on Rails, and the offerings of some of the big players in the space, including Joyent and 37 Signals?

I threw in WordPress as a point of comparison. Obviously, it is still early days. If you do not know what rails is, go to www.rubyonrails.org, click on the link under the title “Get Excited” and make Jason Hoffman’s day by watching the Putting Flickr on Rails screen cast. Nothing makes Jason happier than knowing that thousands of people are watching videos served up by TextDrive. Even if you are not an engineer or technologist, it is worth your time to watch the whole 5 minutes. It will show you clearly how much faster it is to develop web applications in Ruby on Rails.

Writing a blog is a great way to manage your career… if done right. You will broaden your network of contacts, learn a tremendous amount, and you might even have some fun doing it. But where to start?

I have been thinking about writing a post on this for a while, and was prompted into action by a great email from Mike Bubyn. So far, I have been lucky enough to get a reasonable amount of traffic on Innovation Creators and a few friends have asked me how they can set up their own blog. For what it’s worth, here’s my advice:

Steps for getting your business blog set up

If you want to create a professional looking site and generate a reasonable amount of traffic, you will probably want to do more than just sign up for a site at blogger.com. However, it is still very easy. The whole process should only take you an hour or two.

• Select a good blog host. I recommend Wordpress.com. Top business bloggers use them. Wordpress themes mean you can put together a professional look within minutes. Right behind them is TypePad. If you are interested in playing with the technical details of a blogging system and getting some hacking experience, get an account at TextDrive and install Wordpress. If you want to be really cutting edge, install Typo
• Register your blog with Technorati. Technorati helps you keep track of who is linking to your blog. Blogging is all about community and conversation. Technorati is a critical tool that can be used to facilitate that conversation.
• Prepare to track who is coming to your blog. Get Sitemeter, Performancing or Google Analytics. You can even get all three. All three ask you to cut and paste a little snippet of code into you template. The code helps you to keep track of what people are reading and who is linking to your site.
• Immediately put together a blog roll of related blogs that you are impressed with. This will be useful for your visitors, and it will help with your search engine rankings.
• I think it is a good idea to post your photo. It worked for Ross Mayfield and Doc Searls. Blogs are primarily about communication, and a photo helps establish a connection with your readers - or maybe its best to think of it the other way round; the photo helps your readers to feel more connected to you.
• In the about page, put together a few short sentences of what you are trying to accomplish.
• Register with feedburner. They’ll give you a snippet of code that will help you keep track of how many people are subscribing to your feed.
• Add your email address on the site, but use an email obfuscator. I recommend one by Tim Williams. You can get the code at www.jottings.com/obfuscator

Tips on actually writing a successful business orientated blog and creating significant traffic.

• Remain professional - no personal attacks against people inside or outside your company. Flames might be funny, but a business blog represents you online. A personal blog is a marketing tool. The brand is you. Don’t do anything to needlessly tarnish that brand. For example, even though she aims to be a fringe blogger, Miss Rouge’s HorseCowPig blog is a great main stream example of a how you can write an interesting, fun, professional and highly successful blog without slamming people on a regular basis.
• Write at least 50% of your posts in a vacuum, or at least only in reaction to what is happening within your world and the challenges you are facing. If you have writer’s blog, er.. writer’s block, you can go to something like techmeme and see what people are discussing. However, I think it is always better to try and start with your own ideas.
• Respond to comments. I recommend keeping comments open, but moderating them. There is a lot of comment spam out there, just as there is a lot of track back spam out there. Do not let people automatically post all comments directly. You’ll find yourself linked to every spam blog (or splog) out there.
• If you write about a good article on another site, try to add value. XYZ said this, which made me think about ABC.
• Link to other bloggers. If you are taking about Google, and you want to comment on something they are doing, such as Google Trends, go to technorati and find someone who is blogging about Google Trends. This is sharing the wealth.
• A good rule of thumb is at least 2 links per post
• Remember that your blog is like an extended cover letter. Do not put anything in your blog that you will not be proud of. For every job you apply for, there is a chance that your prospective employer will read your entire blog.

Advice on style

• Be bold about each thesis you put together. I think of each blog post as a mini essay. An essay with a strong clear thesis is generally more interesting. I once heard a rumor that the Economist tells its writers that the magazine’s moto is: simplify, simplify, exaggerate. Regardless of whether or not it’s true, it’s a good guide.
• People like lists and shorter posts. It’s a good idea to keep it short sweet and direct. I’m afraid I don’t often take my own advice on this one. I have written posts that print out as 15 page pdfs.

The number one rule for creating a successful business blog.

• Stick with it. Lots of people blog for 3 months and stop. You need to blog constantly, and at a constant pace. If your audience expects 1 a day, you have produce 1 a day. if your audience expects 1 a week, that’s fine, but make sure you produce 1 a week. You will loose a lot of momentum if you suddenly stop for 2 weeks. Expect it to take months to build up a sizable audience.

Sticking with it is actually the only hard and fast rule to creating a successful business orientated blog.

Good luck.

Bill McNee has written a great article entitled Get Ready for SaaS 2.0.

He begins by saying “A new study reveals seven key trends as software-as-a-service evolves beyond its current focus on cost-effective software application delivery toward an integrated business service provisioning platform.”

Bill is completely right. Cost isn’t the key issue. The main selling point for SaaS is a massive jump in productivity.

SaaS is a form of out-sourcing. As Thomas Friedman says in Flat World, you don’t out-source to save money, you out-source to win.