Skype
We used Skype for VoIP meetings and decided to also try to share documents through that. However, the same ‘hard to manage’ problem occurred when we were not signed into Skype. We did however continue using Skype for VoIP conferences; which is significantly better than sending emails or even using MSN messenger.

Google Docs
We discovered that the processing, formatting and editing power of Google docs is severely limited in comparison to desktop processing solutions. For this reason, the most attractive aspect of Google Docs (being free of charge) is potentially its free price tag.

Microsoft Office Live
Using OffiveLive as a collaborative workspace was a little daunting at first, however it became quite simple and user friendly once we familiarised ourselves with it.
We soon discovered that OfficeLive excelled where Google Docs failed. We were able to develop a document on our desktops (locally) then upload it to the online workspace for sharing and editing. Once this occurred OfficeLive would send an email update to all registered editors, updating them of the document’s status.

We then developed a centralised document, which each member added his or her individual sections to. Each user would access the document; edit it locally and then update the document on the server. After editing they save the document and it automatically.

Such a problem exists in many companies, which are not willing to invest in a professional document management solution. Thinking about this problem again, it can be solved easily using Web 2.0 technologies. A simple wiki would allow different participant to maintain their content and ensure that it up to date. It would also make it easy to track the changes of the document and notify all participants if any change occurred on their area of interest by subscribing to that page RSS feed.

This is just a simple example of how simple and free Web 2.0 tool would increase the collaboration, improve the business process and eliminate redundant work.

Facebook is one of the top ranked websites, which has 150,000,000 active users. This massive number of users made organization worldwide realized that social networks is a very effective communication channel not only to target current customers but also to find potential customers. Feature in Facebook such as page suggestion can be extremely useful to engage more users. Loyal customers play an important role to by providing feedback to the company or inviting their friends to fan pages.

Companies also can promote their new products or their latest news to their fans. Compared to announcements of the organization’s website, this is a better faster and more effective communication channel. Instead of waiting for the customer to search for the organisation website, organisation are fostering their presence where a customer is likely to exist.

Enterprise 2.0 changes the way employees approaches their work. Thus, it has to be treated as like any major change in the organization. This means that the change should be vividly communicated with stakeholders in order to contain and manage their expectations. Another important factor is training, which is required to ensure that the desired outcome from Enterprise 2.0 is achieved.

After considering different products, the giant consulting firm decided to use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) to host its social networking site. MOSS facilities a number of Web 2.0 application such blog, wikis and multimedia hosting. The notion of this site was to increase collaboration, empower virtual teams and develop additional bonds between employees.

Eight months after full deployment about 45% have of the employees personalized their profiles, uploaded photos, or used personal blogging and publishing tools. In addition, over 9,000 affiliations to business-related communities that have been created by participants.

Observers suggest that many employees are using the system to increase visibility and articulate their “personal brand” within the organization. Apart from increased engagement and satisfaction for the individual, the organization believes that this is helping to improve talent assimilation as well as the productivity of their project teams.

A number of success factors were extracted from this implementation:

• The project should have clear scope and vision
• The importance of top management support
• The lack of anonymity, policies based on employee code of conduct, active moderation and social controls remove the risk of inappropriate behavior in open publishing environments.
• Stakeholders’ involvement and representation including communications, human resources, knowledge management, IT and end users

Email has not changed a lot since it was invented about 40 years ago, the irony that we still use the same technology for most of our communication. Google way of innovation is to look at frequently used application and think about it as it is being developed today.

A major shortcoming for current email services is that after a set of email with different parties involved in the same email thread, the conversation gets really difficult to follow. Adding new parties to that conversation and make them understand what was going on is another story. Moreover, the content of the email cannot be changed. If some information listed in that threat was modified, the participant of the conversation has to read the thread again to know exactly what has changed.

Google exploited all the new Web 2.0 technologies and re-engineered email as if it was developed today. Instead of the sending emails to multiple parties, the conversation is hosted online where everyone can contribute to it.  Another feature of Google Wave is that it is a real-time conversation, which all participants can view what is currently being written and reply immediately, a feature that will combine the old email and chat. Also, the new Google server will allow parties to drag and drop attachments to specific text, which make comprehending the context of the conversation much easier.

An interesting note that there are many technologies that we keep on using are used still based on the same technology constraints of the past half century I wonder how the Public Switched Network (PSTN) will look like if it was invented today.

The following video explains some of the features of Google Wave:

The survey covered these business areas: Internal processes, Employee use, Partner purposes, Customer purposes, Satisfaction levels, Adoption rates, Who the users are, Key tools and Future Investments. The survey focused on these Web 2.0 tools: Blogs, Mash-ups, Microbloging, Peer to peer, Podcasts, Prediction markets, Rating, RSS, Social networking, Tagging, Video sharing and Wikis.

Internal processes:

Partner purposes:

Customer purposes:

Adoption rates:

Future investment:

Key tools:

Sources:
http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/How_businesses_are_using_Web_20_A_McKinsey_Global_Survey_1913
Complete survey results can be found here

In 2005, Wikipedia had only a single employee, who is the main software developer. The organization structure is chaotic and unlike any other organization. There are no allocated tasks. Instead, tasks are executed by anyone who wants to pitch in. Several organizations struggle to get things done with a controlled organization structure, while Wikipedia manages to be one of the most visited websites on the Internet. When Wikipedia started making news headlines in 2005, even Web 2.0 guru Andrew McAfee predicted that it is going to break down because he know the limited scalability of online communities. In fact an article about skinheads drew his attention to Wikipedia and to Web 2.0.  The important question is how did they manage to be successful?

Top ranked websites by Alexa:
1- Google.com
2- Yahoo.com
3- Facebook.com
4- Youtube.com
5- Live.com
6- Wikipedia.org
7- Blogger.com
8- Msn.com
9- Baidu.com
10- Yahoo.co.jp

Comparing Wikipedia page views to other top ranked websites

Jimmy Wales answered a question about how Wikipedia manages the quality of the content and keep it protected from vandalism and the content from being bias. He said the most important thing is our non-debatable neutral point of view policy, which was set from the beginning of the project. He explained that Wikipedia does not talk about truth or objectivity critic topics. Instead, it provides different opinions and what several parties have said about the topic. The importance of this neutrality is to get a diverse community to work together. However every time a change occurs on a page, it feeds into an IRC channel, RSS and notifies people who added that page to their watch list. These changes then incorporated or deleted. On other occasions, people may start pages with meaningless names or these pages also must be deleted.

Despite the possibility of editing Wikipedia pages without registration, anonymous users contribute only to 18% of the total editing. A very close community does the majority of the edits. This community is constant communication on IRC channels and discuss boards. This tight community is the one who cares about the quality of the site. However, there is still a place for centralized decision making when needed. Jimmy Wales gave an example about a foundation that encouraged its members to vote on the deletion or certain pages. Even though they could not manage to get the majority to delete those page, Jimmy said we will change the rules if we had to keep the content from being bias.

Source:

http://www.wikipedia.org/
Enterprise 2.0 by Andrew McAfee

In a previous post, I cited a definition of Project Management 2.0 as “the natural evolution of project management practices brought by Web 2.0 technologies”. This post will investigate how Web 2.0 tool can be used to in project management.

Requirement Elicitation:

Understanding the exact requirements of the project is a key factor for any project success. Existing requirements elicitation techniques include:
Stakeholders’ interviews
• Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP)
• Document archaeology
• Brainstorming
• Business use case workshops
Some of the issue related to these techniques are the limited time for senior management to be involved in long interviews and workshop. Another issue is the nature of the requirement itself. Several projects failed because stakeholders were unable to exactly determine their exact objectives.

Web 2.0 tools like wikis, blogs and mash ups facilitate a way for stakeholders and other project parties to collaborate to build those requirements and communicate them effectively. The development of the requirement with in a Web 2.0 environment triggers other hidden requirements, which are difficult to depict in other techniques. The use of Web 2.0 might not replace the previously listed methods, but it certainly assists and improves them.

Configuration Management:
Configuration Management is essential to keep track of project assets, making sure that the project team is using the latest updated versions of the project documents such as Quality plan, Work Packages, and even the project plan. Web 2.0 such as wikis can support the work of the configuration librarian, who is responsible of configuration management, and enable him to communicate with correspondent personnel in case a change occurred. For example, if a new version of the project plan was released tools like twitter would be very practical to inform the project team of this change. As professor Michael Rosemann suggested in his paper about the use of twitter to track business processes, twitter can be used to track project assets as well.

Issues Management
As previously mentioned that Web 2.0 tools such as twitter could be used to track assets, it also can be used to raise a project issue and communicate with the correspondent personnel is a timely fashion. Moreover, a search tool can be used to look up for issues from prior projects and quickly learn from the learned lessons.

Despite that the fact that Web 2.0 tool are very practicable and applicable for project management, the current version of these tools might not empower the project as perceived. Some of the problems with the existing tools are privacy, security and formalization. However, a new set of customized web application can be developed to compensate these areas.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_2.0
http://www.wrike.com/projectmanagement/07/03/2009/What-Is-the-Best-Way-to-Enterprise-2-0-Implementation
http://www.prince2.com/