The Next Wave in Productivity Tools

Feb 8, 2006

I N N O V A T I O N C R E A T O R SHow Web Off ice Technology can be used to turn Knowledge Workers into Innovation Creators

I n n o v a t i o n C r e a t o r s • b y R o d B o o t h b y • r o d . b o o t h b y @ g m a i l . c o m • w w w. i n n o v a t i o n c r e a t o r s . c o m

The Next Wave in Productivity Tools

It’s not what you know, or who you know... it’s how many people you can reach

They are young. They are smart. And they are better connected than anyone you have ever met. In the

summer of 2006, twenty-somethings will be busting out of graduate school powered by a brand new set of

productivity tools. Think about the jump from typewriters to word processors. Think about how, in the

1980s, our parents had to struggle to learn to use spreadsheets like VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3. We are on the

verge of experiencing a jump in the capabilities of office tools that is just as significant as the jump that oc-

curred when the first PCs landed on people’s desks. Why is this jump so big, and what does it have to do

with the class of 2006? What are these people capable of? Well, to begin with, for most of them, the inter-

net has been around since before they started high school.

The average MBA graduates in 2006 are not just knowledge workers. They are capable of being highly

networked internal entrepreneurs and innovation creators. Their ability to connect is not just about email,

BlackBerries, text messages and voice-mails. They are intimately familiar with all those tools, but ulti-

mately, expertise with those one-to-one connectivity tools is just the price of admission.

What makes these new graduates so effective is their ability to work efficiently with large virtual teams and

their amazing ability to maximize the power of their personal networks.

Here’s what this new generation of knowledge workers uses to get their work done:

Blogs ! With 10 minutes of effort a day, they use blogs (which are web pages that are easy

to edit) to reach a massive audience. They can develop a worldwide reputation as

an expert in their field. These MBAs don’t blog about parties or their dog. They

blog business topics like marketing or financial derivatives. Even with traffic of

only 5 to 10 people a day, that quickly translates into over 1,000 people who know

who they are, and respect their knowledge and opinions.

Wikis! If you are working on an MBA and you do not leverage Wikipedia to do your re-

search, you should. Some schools have started to set up course related Wikis as a

medium for students to share information, answers, and ultimately develop a

deeper understanding. Wikis are a collection of web pages that are just as easy to

edit as blogs. Wikis are organized by topic like an encyclopedia, and are designed

to help large teams share information.

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Wikipedia for sharing answers - FAST !LinkedIn extends the reach of your networkTypePad powers many top blog sites

Social Networks! At school, many of today’s grads are part of Facebook, which is part blog, part

social networking tool. The grads know that Facebook will be an invaluable tool

for keeping connected with their fellow alumni over the years. In the business

world, they will join a similar social network called LinkedIn.

Project Coordination! They all have different schedules and different classes. Yet they have no trouble

working together. It isn’t rocket science. They use online project management

tools such as Basecamp.com or Backpack.com.

A new phase in the web means a new phase on your intranet

The movement that is powering all these new technologies is loosely called Web 2.0. For the business

world, Web 2.0 means three things.

Read / Write Web

Richard MacManus calls his blog “The Read/Write Web”. The name perfectly sums up the new philosophy

about the web. People now believe that instead of just surfing the web, users should contribute as much

content as they consume. The results are blogs and Wikis. This is fundamentally different from simply

using a web-based application to sell something, find a job or find a mate. The difference is that blogs and

Wikis support the distribution of ideas and innovations. The 2006 MBA grads are going to expect to be able

to continue using blogs and Wikis within the enterprise, just as they did at grad school.

Web Office solutions are going to use this new philosophical approach (that the web should be both read-

able and writable) to redefine how knowledge workers share information. With enterprise blogs and enter-

prise Wikis, knowledge workers will now have the ability to efficiently communicate with a large audience.

Later, I’ll show you some examples of how knowledge workers will use enterprise blogs to share their skills,

track clients, co-ordinate projects and discuss areas of special interest to them and their colleagues.

Write Once / Use Often

With enterprise blogs and enterprise Wikis, when you write an article or a post, that information is captured

in a structured format. That means it can be turned into many things. For example, most blogging sys-

tems, including MovableType and WordPress, will turn your blog posts into a feed. This means that people

who use news readers to gather information from the feeds of multiple blogs and sites like the New York

Times, can also get a feed from your project.

But why stop with news readers? Today’s office tools could be described as write once, search often and cut

& paste even more. Web Office is going to change that. People won’t set out to write searchable text when

they post to an enterprise blog or Wiki, but the Web Office technology will produce searchable text that can

be easily hyper-linked and searched almost as a kind of side benefit. And what an amazing positive exter-

nality it is.

Throughout Web Office, information will become efficiently reusable. For example, random project blog

and Wiki posts from one employee can be combined into a full HR report on that person’s performance.

Every post, comment and email about a client can be combined into a simple comprehensive report on the

state of the company’s relationship with that client. Basic technology such as feeds are already making this

possible.

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DIY Micro-solutions - aka Mash-ups, Widgets and Badges

Before the spreadsheet came along, if business professionals wanted to do analysis, they either broke out the

slide-ruler or turned to the IT department for help.

Today, a business professional wanting to combine information in two web systems to create a new piece of

functionality has to do it manually with cut & paste, or turn to the IT department for help.

Web Office is going to change that. Housingmaps.com is a perfect example of what can be made with this

new technology. Paul Rademacher built housingmaps by combining the houses listed for sale on Craigslist

with the Google mapping tool. The very cool result is shown above. Housingmaps was built with a little

AJAX, which is about as complicated as VBA. The MBA class of 2006 is expert at building little Excel mac-

ros using VBA. Just imagine what they will be capable of doing with a enterprise platform that is designed

for building little AJAX tools such as housingmaps.com.

The technology isn’t the key thing here. Instead, it is the idea that business professionals would want to be

able to build their own web based applications. What an amazing notion! The implication is that IT

should stop building end solutions that often only frustrate. Instead, IT should build tools that empower

knowledge workers to build their own solutions. Here are some examples of how the web is being turned

into so much conceptual Lego:

• CalendarHub.com has created something called Badges. Go to their site and fill in an online calendar.

Then, they give you a piece of code that you can cut and paste into your blog or Wiki posts. The little

snippet gets automatically updated every time you change your calendar.

• 37 Signals has created a tool called Basecamp.com. It is a platform for creating simple new applications

from combinations of online lists and polls. That is powerful. Tools like Basecamp are doing for the web

what spreadsheets did for analysis. They are empowering business professionals in whole new ways.

But it can be taken even further. Those Basecamp lists can be turned into a feed. Ismael Ghalimi, the

founder and CEO of Intalio, and author of IT|Redux, has released a Badge like script that helps you to

include Basecamp lists in your blog. Add something to a Basecamp list, and it shows up on your blog.

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Web 2.0 in the Workplace – What tools they are going to need?

When the MBA class of 2006 shows up for work, here’s what they’ll expect to find, because this is the list of

tools they are already using:

COMPONENTS OF WEB OFFICE DESCRIPTION OF CURRENT TOOLS

Web Based Enterprise Email Zimbra is a perfect example - think gMail on steroids. Click on

a name and you get the person’s contact information. It does

the same for dates in your calendar.

Enterprise Blogs The recipe here is simple. People pages, project blogs, client

blogs, product blogs. Sixapart and WordPress are both options.

Enterprise Wiki Google and Yahoo! make great use of enterprise Wikis. Social-

Text and JotSpot are among several enterprise class vendors.

Social Network Tool Integration LinkedIn shows you how your friends can introduce you to

people in high places. Companies will want to verify who be-

longs to their LinkedIn group using an enterprise gateway.

Web 2.0 Project Management The best example is 37 Signal’s basecamp.com. Its power is its

simplicity. Share editable to-do lists on a web page.

Voting and Tagging Tools Think Enterprise Digg. People can vote on good ideas. If 100

people in the company like your idea, the CEO has to pay atten-

tion. Tagging, like del.icio.us will also help organize content.

Enterprise Podcasting Podcasting is a method of delivering multimedia such as audio

and video. Web Office is not just about words.

Web Based Integrated Feed Readers In a large company, with potentially hundreds of blogs, feed

readers will be critical tools for managers. See Netvibes.com.

Widget / Badging Platform Widgets and AJAX badges give non-technical users the power

to drop highly interactive tools into their blog posts Wiki arti-

cles. See the Appendix for more details.

Enterprise Search Today, internal enterprise search does not work well because it

is hard to rank order information. Hyperlinks through out

Web Office will fix that. For ideas, check out Technorati.com.

IM based Presence Information Hover over a person’s name and you can see if that person is

online and available for an immediate dialog.

Integrated IP Telephony Step 1, turn you conference calls into internal podcasts.

Step 2, use Podzinger.com to convert those podcasts into

searchable text. Or apply Podzinger to voicemail.

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As of February 2006, you can’t get a complete Web Office solution from one vendor. Although you can cer-

tainly get important pieces from vendors like SocialText, SixApart and Zimbra. However, like it or not, the

MBA class of 2006 is already using open internet versions of all these tools and they are are going to want to

continue using them.

What’s not on the list?

It’s interesting to note that Web Office is not an AJAX version of Microsoft Office, but instead, is a whole

new way of working. So AJAX powered versions of MS Word or Excel are not really needed. And they do

not achieve any significant bump in productivity over existing tools because they are not designed to help

knowledge workers efficiently communicate with a large audience. Instead, blogs and Wikis will take over

that role.

What will these solutions actually look like? An example of enterprise blogging:

Image if everyone in your organization

had a blog that described them, included

their resume, a list of all their skills, and

was automatically kept up to date with a

list of all the projects they were working

on. You could call these types of blogs

“People Pages”. That is the beginning of

an enterprise blogging solution.

Here’s what my team is building for our

firm of 130,000 auditors and consultants.

We are starting with 5 types of blogs.

Each has a fairly narrow focus. Except

for the People Pages, each type of blog is

designed to be written by a group of peo-

ple. We are creating an automatic cross-

linking script. Add someone to the list of

people working on a project and the script automatically updates their People Page. We are also setting up

automatically generated directories. When someone creates a Project Page, that project will be added to the

directory of all projects. By adding this minimal amount of structure, we are going to be able to help people

find the information they need when they need it. Undoubtedly, we will need additional tagging tools.

Web O!ce can reduce email overload

Today, many knowledge workers feel overloaded because they are forced to react to a constant stream of

email, phone calls and instant messages. Email, the phone and instant messaging have one thing in com-

mon - they are all push work flows. In other words, they interrupt what you are doing. Theoretically, peo-

ple can ignore all three, but generally, socially, it is difficult to get away with ignoring all three when you are

at the office. Web Office will change that. With Web Office, knowledge workers can pull the information

they need when they need it. They can use directories to go straight to the right People Page or Project

Page. If that doesn’t work, they can use enterprise search tools. Knowledge workers can also post infor-

mation, and know that their colleagues will find it when they need it. Gone is the need to blast out an

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email to everyone in a large group, providing them with information they might need in the future. My

colleague, Dan Hoover, puts it this way: “Web Office replaces the current manual processes of reacting to

emails, and organizing emails with a system that lets the computer do the filtering and organizing for you.”

Impact on Enterprise IT

The next few years are going to be a challenging time for

most IT departments. Their current role as gatekeepers

to enterprise systems such as web portals and CRM tools

is going to go away. Further, big internal IT shops that

have grown used a very structured process of developing

internal software are going to find that their internal cli-

ents can now build many of those tools themselves. For

some IT teams that assertion might sound ridiculous.

How could end users build a massive system them-

selves? However, it is more than possible. It is happen-

ing now. Housingmaps.com and all the other Google

Maps mash-ups show that a business professional with only a little knowledge about a powerful scripting

language can build a brilliant new application in just days. And Housingmaps.com scales. It has hundreds

of thousands of users.

As more of those power users learn to use tools like Ruby on Rails, the pace of change and the power of the

solutions these users can build is only going to increase.

Internal IT departments will feel further pressure as senior management gets increasingly comfortable with

out-sourced providers. SalesForce.com has proven that many mission critical enterprise applications can,

and should, be provided by an external vendor.

In the face of all this, a pro-active internal IT department can contribute tremendously to the organizations’

ability to innovate and increase productivity.

The right approach will require a change of mindset, from one that provided solutions to one that provides

tools. In addition to providing the infrastructure that will support Web Office, IT will have to change the

way it builds systems. Rather than massive solutions it builds today, IT will shift to open, modular systems,

with service orientated architectures. This means they will be building lots of little solutions that are de-

signed from the get go to talk with other applications.

To use a bank as an example, instead of a complete credit card loan processing system, the bank’s IT de-

partments will build a client ID system, a loan obligation system, a loan guarantee system, a loan grading

system and marketing / pricing system. The singular source for client IDs can be reused for auto loans,

student loans, etc. The same client IDs can be pulled into client blogs, making it easy for bankers to bring a

well informed team of experts together to provide clients with a coherent package of financial services.

Have you ever dealt with a bank, and felt like the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing? In

most banks, your gut feeling was right. If you have 250,000 bankers, how can the mortgage people know

that what the insurance people have sold you? The simple approach described above solves that problem.

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Dude, your job didn’t just go to India. Parts

of it got automated. Parts of it were rendered

irrelevant as the technology changed. Some

technology skills that were critical in 1999 can

now be thrown into the dustbin.

To survive now, you have to keep learning,

innovate constantly, and change yourself in

the face of change.

How do you manage people in this type of environment?

Web Office is going to present a significant challenge for many managers. No longer will they gain power

from control of information. Instead, power will go to managers who can cultivate an environment that

encourages employees to make the most out of these new tools. Internal entrepreneurs should thrive in this

kind of work place.

It also requires managers to trust their employees. Today, everyone in a large company could send an email

to every single other person in the firm. That does not happen very often. However, with enterprise blogs

and Wikis, people can and will write pages that everyone in the company could see. Managers will have to

trust that their employees will do the right thing when working with Web Office tools, just as they trust to-

day that people will use email professionally. And, obviously, there will always be exceptions.

Scott K. Wilder is Intuit’s QuickBooks Group Manager in charge of Community and Collaboration. Scott

runs a program at Intuit that sets up any Intuit employee to blog publicly about their job and the products

that Intuit builds. Intuit’s approach to trust is truly impressive. Scott K. Wilder told me that when he

talked with Intuit’s CEO, Steve Bennett, about setting up the program, Bennett’s response was to say that if

Intuit trusts people enough to hire them, and then to require that those employees literally follow customers

home to see how the customers use the product, then Intuit certainly can trust those employees enough to

blog about the company and its products in a professional way.1

Such a public approach to Web Office technology makes a great deal of sense for a software company like

Intuit that focuses on encouraging employees to know the customer. For other types of organizations, such

as hospitals or banks, Web Office tools can help to facilitate internal communication, but there will be far less

need to create public forums.

Beyond issues of trust, creating an environment that fosters innovation and encourages employees to make

the most out of Web Office technology requires a different approach to motivation.

Dave Thomas, one of the original signatories to the Manifesto for Agile Software Development has some

great advice:

Dave calls it management by intentions. This approach presents an amazing opportunity for a company to

increase the pace of internal innovation and to get every member of the organization to focus on the com-

pany’s key strategic objectives.

How Google uses Web O!ce to Focus Its People on Key Strategic Objectives

Today, Google is one of the most active users of Web Office technology. Everyone in the company can create

a blog, everyone can contribute to a series of internal Wikis and everyone understands their key company

objective. Google claims that its objective is to organize the world’s information. But that isn’t exactly

what they are trying to do. The world’s information is already organized, it’s just that it is poorly organ-

ized. Google’s real objective it to constantly come up with new, innovate and better ways of organizing the

M a n a g e r s s h o u l d n o t t r e a t t h e i r e m p l o y e e s a s e q u a l s . I n s t e a d , t r e a t t h e m a s

s u p p l i e r s . D o n ’ t t e l l t h e m h o w t o d o w h a t y o u w a n t . I n s t e a d , c h a l l e n g e t h e m

t o p r o v i d e y o u w i t h b e t t e r w o r k p r o d u c t s a n d i n n o v a t i v e s o l u t i o n s .

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1 I do not have the exact quote from Steve Bennett, but it is my understanding that this is basically what he said.

world’s information. Innovation is so firmly baked into Google’s culture that they do not even bother to

mention it in their stated objective.

To come up with innovative ways of organizing the world’s information, Google relies upon its engineers.

Google engineers are allowed to spend 20% of their time doing whatever they want. Eric Schmidt, the

Google CEO has said that every new product in Google comes from the engineers and their 20% free time.

The engineers are so successful because they can use the internal Web Office solutions to quickly find out

about interesting side projects to work on, or about the key problems that the company is trying to solve.

In most other firms, only the top executives are focused on trying to address the key strategic problems fac-

ing the company. At Google, every single engineer has been asked to contribute to the effort.

Training and Rollout of Web O!ce

Training and rollout of any Web Office solutions is an important phase, and often will prove to be tougher

than actually setting up the system. Intuit’s Scott K. Wilder offers some great advice:

1. People will be interested, but nervous. People want to participate, but they also do not want to look

stupid or make a mistake. People realize that Web Office’s internal blogs and Wikis can be used as a

great personal reputation management tool; everyone sees your work, so they know how good you are.

But that same connectivity and broad internal exposure can form a double edged sword. To address

this, Scott K. Wilder put together a brilliant 1-page set of guidelines for Intuit. The guidelines helped

people get comfortable with the technology. Scott told me to “think of the guidelines as guide-rails to

help employees navigate the web and become comfortable posting”.

2. Managers will need to learn to trust. Any company considering allowing internal or external blogging

is going to face some concern from senior management. Senior managers will need to learn to trust

their employees. However, this shouldn’t be too hard. Managers will quickly see that the quality of

their people will not fall apart just because they are now using a new technology. However, if man-

agement does not start by trusting, and instead requires something like formal approval for every in-

ternal blog and Wiki post, then the system will never take off and the promises of Web Office will go

unrealized. The self motivated, innovative and emergent teams simply won’t show up.

3. Roll-out of Web Office requires extensive training. For many current bloggers the technology might

seem obvious. However this is not necessarily true for most mid to late adaptors. For example, people

need to be trained on how to use the blogging system, what to blog about and just as importantly, what

not to blog about. At Intuit, about 50% of the training focuses on legal issues. This may sound oner-

ous, but actually, it helps people get comfortable with how they can avoid looking stupid or making a

mistake. Taking the time to give people a solid background on these issues is critical to getting them

comfortable with the technology.

4. Senior management has to buy-in and support the effort. It doesn’t take much to get people excited

about using this technology. Management will need to provide public recognition for useful internal

blogs, great Wiki posts, and most importantly, for the successful efforts of internal entrepreneurs who

have leveraged the Web Office system to produce tangible results. Senior management will also need

to lead by example. This means they will have to participate. Even the CEO will need to run a blog.

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5. Keep and publish Web Office metrics. Scott K. Wilder suggests that it is also important to provide on

going support for the enterprise blogging initiative, through things like updates and results published

on an internal blog. He suggests tracking the progress of the system. Tactically, this probably means

designing a system to capture and report on the number of posts, cross links, page views, comments,

track backs, key-words, searches and clicked on search results. And most important, pay attention to

what users are saying in their comments and in their own blogs.

Impact on Technology companies

The advent of Web Office is going to produce big waves in the software business.

Web Office is the most serious challenge ever mounted to Microsoft’s monopoly. People do not use Win-

dows because they are emotionally attached to the operating system. Instead, they feel compelled to use

Windows because so much of the business world has standardized on Microsoft Office. Today, you have to

submit a resume in a Word doc format.

Web Office threatens Microsoft because it challenges the need for programs like Word. If you do all your

writing on emails and searchable blogs and Wikis, why would you need Microsoft Word? Further, Gmail

has already conclusively shown that working with old word files is easy on a web setting. Gmail instantly

converts Word docs into HTML pages. Web Office means that you only need a browser to do your work. If

you are constantly flipping back and forth between multiple web pages, a tabbed browser is probably what

you’ll want. Firefox, Flock, Opera and Safari will all do the trick. All four browsers run on Apple’s OS/X,

and the first three also run on Linux.

Microsoft has already reacted to this situation by announcing Office Live. However, from the somewhat

psychedelic diagrams used to announce the effort, and the allusions to ad supported software, its not exactly

clear they have thought through all the issues. Most large organizations will not want to have their internal

blogs and Wikis littered with advertising.

Beyond the Word and PDF viewers in Gmail, Google’s investment in Blogger.com and its enterprise search

appliance, it isn’t clear yet what kind of Web Office tools and services Google intends to bring to the market.

There is no reason why Web Office is necessarily going to be something that is installed behind company

firewalls. In fact, some Web Office services, such as social networking services (like LinkedIn) are only pos-

sible if a significant portion of the service is run outside company firewalls. Because of its investments in

massive mobile server clusters dotted around the globe, Google is uniquely positioned to provide the scale

and security necessary for an externally hosted Web Office product.

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Photo by Niall KennedyPhoto by Niall Kennedy

Yahoo! claims firmly that they are not going to be going into competition with Google and Microsoft on the

Web Office front. However, Yahoo’s recent deal with Six Apart to provide blog services as a part of the Ya-

hoo! Small Business offering gives pause for thought. Yahoo!’s further investments in social software tools

such as Flickr and Del.icio.us are starting to position the company as potentially an excellent provider in this

space. Imagine getting the power of Yahoo! finance and Yahoo! news feeds integrated directly into your

enterprise blog and Wiki posts. Yahoo!’s highly successful instant messaging platform can certainly al-

ready provide valuable presence information.

At the moment, there is only one large player in the Web Office space: SalesForce.com. However, while

SalesForce.com has opened up its platform with API’s that encourage other developers, it appears that they

are focused on trying to provide end solutions rather than providing simple, but extremely powerful tools

like internal enterprise blogs and Wikis.

The other current players in this space are very small. Examples include Sixapart, SocialText, Zimbra, Jot-

Spot, 37 Signals and Zoho. None currently offer anything like a complete Web Office solution. But, they

have all made a very interesting beginning. One of them could easily be the next Google. The company

that wins this space will most likely lead with something that is not already available. An enterprise blog or

enterprise Wiki provider is my best guess. The winner will quickly follow this with a widget / badging

platform that will give non-technical users the power to quickly and easily create robust highly interactive

web based applications.

My guess is this will be built on a Ruby on Rails platform, because Ruby on Rails is so powerful and be-

cause Ruby on Rails encourages such radically quick turn around. Currently, 37 Signals and Zoho seem to

be furthest along with their Ruby on Rails based technology.

Conclusions

There are five reasons why any senior executive needs to start thinking about Web Office now:

1. Web Office technology will make partnering and out-sourcing more efficient by creating a platform that

can seamlessly support virtual ad-hoc teams. Thus, it will quickly reduce your costs.

2. If you have any competitors using Web Office technology, they are going to have a significant produc-

tivity lead over you. Web Office will be as big and important as email, and you wouldn’t imagine run-

ning a business today without email.

3. Your new hires are already using this technology. The MBA class of 2006 has lived and breathed the

web since they were in high school. If you don’t provide company endorsed solutions, they will end

up using tools that are available on the open Internet until you do.

4. Most importantly, Web Office will help you to increase the pace of innovation within your organization.

As I explained in my last paper “Turning Knowledge Workers into Innovation Creators”, constant in-

novation is the only business strategy capable of producing a stream of above average profits. To

achieve constant innovation, senior executives need to bring everyone into the effort. Web Office is the

ideal tool to help achieve that goal.

5. Web Office is cheap. You will get a lot of bang for your buck.

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Technical Appendix

This appendix includes a few additional technical thoughts about Web Office and how to set it up.

Unified Web O!ce Input Screens

The way you write content in a web based email tool is the same as the way you write content for blogs and

Wikis. This implies the Web Office will eventually produce a unified interface client, i.e. you only have to

learn one input screen for blogs, Wikis and email. Already, standardized AJAX powered WYSIWYG input

screens have been created.

However, there might be some further benefits if companies are clever about how they implement Web Of-

fice. For example, what if you set up the input screens so people can pick things like Heading 1 or Heading

2, and not pick the font size. They could then apply a beautifully done company wide style sheet. Look

and feel would already be taken care of for you. Apple takes something like this approach with its Pages

word-processor by giving the user types of documents such as White Papers or Brochures. They are al-

ready pre-configured with elegant layouts. With this approach and a couple of simple plug-ins, it is just a

push of a button to turn a project blog into a professionally typeset pdf report.

Microformats

It is important to make sure that your organization does not re-invent the wheel when implementing Web

Office. This will not only reduce the cost of setting up the system, but it will also help you to “future-proof”

what ever you end up building or buying.

www.microformats.org is a really useful resource. The group is trying to gather small reusable XML sche-

mas for everything imaginable. Making sure that your systems adhere to these and other standards will

help you to achieve the goal of Write Once / Use Often.

For example, in the enterprise blogging system that I am currently setting up, we are going to be gathering

meta data whenever People Page is set up. That meta data includes the employees contact information.

That information is going to be available in an hCard format. hCard is an open XML microformat that

maps to the vCards used MS Office. Adhering to the standard means we do not have to spend any time

inventing it ourselves, and we we know that any third party tools we use are likely to compatible with our

information straight out of the box.

AJAX Badges

One of the most important components in Web Office is so new it does not yet have a commonly accepted

name. I call them AJAX Badges, or Widgets. AJAX Badges give non-technical users the power to drop

highly interactive tools into their blog posts wiki articles.

What if, like most business professionals, you are a non-technical user, but you also want to do more than

just write blog posts and Wiki articles? What if you want to take a poll, or build a to-do list with your visi-

tors? What if you want to share an interactive executable version of your calendar, or mash a project man-

agement tool in with your blog posts? On top of it all, you want to be able to build interactive executable

tools into your web pages that actually look as good as the drop-down lists in Gmail or have the same inter-

active feel as Google maps?

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It’s possible, and, it is highly likely that it will become common place in the very near future.

The technology that will make it all happen is called an AJAX Badge. The folks at BlueWire coined the term.

Badges are a magic combination of simple web authoring tools, such as a blog, or a Wiki, a web server, such

as Ruby on Rails at the back end, and AJAX. I believe that Badges will be most important application of

AJAX in defining the true capabilities of Web Office / Web 2.0 and the amazing degree of empowerment it

will bring to knowledge workers.

Here’s how it works:

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Sites You Should Check Out

This paper references a wide range of Web 2.0 technology. For people who have not come across some of

these sites, here is a list of the referenced sites and/or technology and a brief description of each.

WEB SITE WHAT THEY DO

www.zimbra.com They make a web-based email tool. Check out their flash demo. It

explains about 50% of the concepts in here.

www.sixapart.com

www.wordpress.com

These are two providers of blogging platforms. A Blog is just a web

page that is easy to edit. The blogging platform provides you with a

second web page that has an input form. You fill in the headline, write

your article and hit “post”. The blogging platform then automatically

updates your website.

www.wikipedia.com

www.socialtext.com

www.jotspot.com

A Wiki is an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. To get an idea

for the possibilities check out wikipedia. In the search bar, enter your

favorite historical figure. SocialText and JotSpot provide enterprise

versions of this same technology.

www.linkedin.com LinkedIn shows you how your friends can introduce you to people in

high places. The best way to get to know the site is to sign up.

www.backpackit.com Backpack is an online to-do list tool. Setting up a free account is a

quick and easy way to see how people will use Web Office to manage

projects.

www.digg.com Start by visiting the main digg.com website. After checking out some of

the interesting stories, sign up for an account and vote for the stories

you like, or “digg”.

www.odeo.com

www.audioblog.com

Odeo and audioblog will host any podcast that you create. If you have

an Apple computer and iLife’06 it only takes minutes to learn how to

create a podcast.

www.netvibes.com Check out the site. Sign up for a free account and subscribe to some

blogs. You will get the idea pretty quickly.

Widget / Badging Platform

( Not really ready for prime time yet )

Widgets and AJAX badges give non-technical users the power to drop

highly interactive tools into their blog posts Wiki articles.

www.google.com/enterprise/

www.technorati.com

Imagine being able to search the information within your company as

efficiently as you can now search the Internet.

www.meebo.com Meebo - a few young people destined for greatness. On their web site,

you can instant message people on Yahoo!, AOL, MSN and Google.

www.vonage.com

www.skype.com

Vonage or Skype both give a great introduction to how you can run a

phone call over the Internet.

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About the Author - Rod Boothby

I live in San Francisco with my wife, Cindy. My background is in economics and financial derivatives.

My career has included everything from trading interest rate swaps at Wells Fargo, to building and manag-

ing derivatives trading systems to running my own start-up. The start-up came close. In 2001, we had 4

banks sign beta test agreements, and 2 banks signed real purchase orders. Currently, I am a Manager with

Ernst & Young’s Financial Services Advisory practice. I focus on helping our clients deal with:

- Pricing and trading Credit Derivatives, CDOs, CDS indices, bespoke tranches & Fixed Income Derivatives.

- Organization design and strategy issues related to risk management and derivatives trading operations.

- Technology infrastructure design, vendor selection and trading system build out.

For much of my career, I have been an “ideas guy”. I’ve usually worked for large companies. Sometimes, I

had success pushing my innovative ideas. Often, I have run into significant resistance, despite having a

strong business case. In my current job as a Management Consultant, I have had an opportunity to talk

with many senior executives and a few CEOs. I found they shared my frustration. These executives all

want the innovation creators in their organizations to succeed. They know that their people are capable of

generating the equivalent of the next iPod. Their struggle has been how to create a culture of constant suc-

cessful innovation. www.InnovationCreators.com aims to address that question.

About Innovation Creators

www.InnovationCreators.com is a personal blog. It is based on the following ideas:

- Constant innovation is required to succeed into today’s hyper-competitive environment.

- Successful innovation is not about the ideas or inventions; it’s about the people.

- If you want innovation, you have to enable your innovation creators.

The site discusses new approaches to managing for constant innovation and new tools for fostering innova-

tion, such as enterprise blogs, Wikis, and Web Office technology.

The site also includes a directory of Web Office technology.

Contact Information

I’m always happy to talk with people about Web Office and my on-going experience deploying large scale

enterprise blog and Wiki systems.

You can reach me through comments on Innovation Creators, or at rod.boothby@gmail.com

Also by the same author

“Turning Knowledge Workers into Innovation Creators: The 411 on how enterprise blogs can be used to

bake innovation into your organization’s DNA.”

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