Apparently I'm a thought leader with multiple personalities.

Tom Raftery, one of the Enterprise Irregulars, just posted an interview with me that was supposed to have been a tag team event with the Real Time Matrix's Jon Sofield. Something went awry with Skype, Jon could hear us but we couldn't hear him, leaving me to play a dual role.

Tom and I talked about:

• Attensa
• Feed reading in the enterprise
• Web feed applications behind the firewall
• The role of persistent search
• And, the Real Time Matrix approach to precision search filtering

You can listen to the Podleaders interview here.

Dennis Howlett had a follow-up discussion with Jeff Whitehead and shares more insight into the power of precision persistent search.

Yesterday I had a conversation with Jeff Whitehead, CEO of RealTimeMatrix. Jeff is a propeller head but he keeps it just dumbed down enough for me to get it. His company has built a really smart real-time preference based search and deliver tool. With current search a la Google, once you get half way down the page of search results, it falls apart and the cruff level rises dramatically. Anyone disagree?

RTM overcomes that by serving a persistent query that is able to correlate your preferences across multiple descriptive dimensions. On a test of 20,000 search terms run across a million search items, RTM turned up 13 responses. All were highly relevant to the original query. RTMs accuracy levels are an order of magnitude better than Google. In the corporate world, that matters - hugely. Relevant information is not only more valuable but the times savings in research are enormous.

As I’ve written before, RTM has teamed up with Attensa, which understands corporate demands for RSS readers very well. However, RTM isn’t limited to the deep pockets of large enterprise. It is developing very smart widgets that you can use to deliver highly personalised work related tasks. RTM will immediately straddle the market so that SMBs will find the offering affordable. And useful. They are a little way off :”Q1″ is the word, but they’ll be an exciting step forward with much more to come.

 Rod does it again. Here's a solid introduction on putting internal blogs to work.. With our RSS reader integration with Outlook and our development work on Notes and Sametime, why not have the feeds come to you instead of using a web based reader?

"Are you a CEO? Do you want you people to across silos? Do you want your engineers or your designers to know exactly what the sales people are asking them? Or better yet, do you want everyone in your company to have a deep understand of what your clients actually want, need and will pay money for?

Do you want your people to be personally motivated?

Has anything in your company taken off half as aggressively as blogs and social media have taken off in the open Internet?

Now I have a simple question for you. Do you know how to use blogs within your organization to help you get work done? There are plenty of blogs out there that can tell you how to use blogs as a PR and marketing tool to communicate with your clients. But, when people actually think about getting work done within the organization, not a lot has been written.

This post aims to tell you exactly what you need to do to use blogs efficiently within your organization.

Activity Centric Worksites

First, you do not need to buy a multi-million dollar system to get the benefits of Activity Centric Worksites. You can use a regular blogging platform, such as WordPress or MovableType. You will need to hire some consultants to make those consumer systems do the job for you. Total set up cost, in my experience, is $50K to $100K. Or you can spend about the same amount with a pre-built enterprise class system from companies like iUpload, Blogtronix or Traction Software.

The idea behind Activity Centric Worksites is to use blogging tools to facilitate focused business communication. Instead of using a blog as a tool for one person to broadcast their thoughts on “whatever”, use blogs as a platform to help people within your company communicate about what they are doing for work. To make it easy to frame the conversation, provide structure around simple concepts that make sense for your company.

If you are running a consulting company, you might have following Worksite types:
• Project Worksites - these are used to exchange information about a specific project
• Client Worksites - these are used to talk about a specific client
• People Worksites - these are like internal resumes that show who is working on what
• Practice Worksites - these are used to communicate amongst a whole team
• Focus Worksites - the only thing that resembles a consumer blog, these are written by a small group and are like internal e-journals dedicated to specific technical topics

Finding the Right Set of Worksite templates

Depending on what your company does, you are going to need a different list of Worksite templates. Ask yourself what do we talk about here? If you are a software company, you might have whole worksites dedicated to specific modules in the new release of your product. Instead of Practice Worksites, you might have a Release Worksite that coordinates information about each module within the release.

If you are a bank, you might have Clients, Products, Market Overviews, Projects, and People.

Start with Search

Most internet experiences start with someone going to Yahoo, Google, MSN or Baidu. They are all search sites. If you want your people to be productive, your main internal home page shouldn't be some waste of time portal. It should look like Google, and it should help people find the information they need.

Your People will Need Wizards to Help Create New Worksites

A Worksite is more than just a blog theme. For example, a Project Worksite should include a list of the people working on the project with links back to each person's People Worksite. The Project Worksite should probably also include a link to the Client Worksite.

To create a copy of a blank Project Worksite, you need to create a simple wizard that walks your employees through the process of creating a new site. You also need a system that has CMS capabilities which help deal with access control, user authentication, backup, audit trails of who read what, and given admin tools to support the re purposing of posts - write once, publish in many places.

Many to Many Communication

There are very few software systems out there that can even define the notion of a Worksite type, let alone give you the frame work to automate the creation of a new one. The only systems I know of today that can do this are iUpload, Blogtronix and Traction Software.

IBM's Lotus Notes does not have "straight out of the box" support for Activity Centric Blogs - although they do have their own Activity Centric Computing notion. In Hannover, your email inbox is organized into folders that are called activities.

In mid 2006, IBM Lotus CTO Doug Wilson said

Right now, the ‘glue’ that associates tasks and objects within an activity remains in the users’ heads. But if we’re able to create and save the thread of an activity, we should also be able to preserve it as a pattern that others can reuse when performing the same or similar activities."

In Nov of 2006, Domino Blogsphere V3 said

Currently in very early development stages is a new application that doesn't have an official name yet but it is basically a Blog Manager.

I am currently unaware of any other system that can support true enterprise class blogging that could support "Worksites". Microsoft's Sharepoint does not have this functionality.

The issue is one of creating a platform that supports many to many communication, as opposed to most consumer blogging tools, which were originally designed to support one to many communication. There are tools out there that support multiple people authoring one blog, but that isn't the issue here.

For example, in a Big 4 consulting firm of 100,000, you could easily end up with a huge number of blogs:

100,000 People Worksites
400,000 Project Worksites per year
100,000 Client Worksites
5,000 Practice Worksites
5,000 Focus Worksites

Examples

Here are some screenshot examples of what these things could look like. When I created these, I simply called them "Pages" instead of "Worksites". I term "pages" is confusing, because it makes people think they are looking at one page, not a whole site about a specific work topic.

Why not use a Wiki?

Wikis are a useful tool for collaborating on a document. They become less useful when they are used to communicate about events. For example, Wikipedia is a great encyclopedia. But, when you think about daily events such as updates on the relationship with a client, or the latest events in a project, blogs already have the built in notion of time stamped posts that communicate that information.

This is not to say that a company should never use wikis. Instead, there is a time and place for both wikis and blogs within the Enterprise.

Motivation through Recognition

To get people to contribute, you have to give them a personal reason to use a new system like this. One way is to make sure that people get credit for the good work they do.

Other tips and Tricks

• Email Integration - Transition in to using the system by making sure that your Worksite system supports an email address for every blog / Worksite. That way, people can just cc the blog instead of CC'ing to CYA. This also gives people an easy way to start to use a big system.
• Dos and Don'ts - People will recognize that the new system is a powerful reputation management system. Some will be worried that it could damage their reputation as much as help them. Give them some guidance with a firm set of dos and don'ts/
• Screencasts - The success of YouTube has proven that people LOVE videos. Use videos and screencasts to teach your employees about the new system and get them excited to use it.
• Use Weekly Email Updates - Blogs do not replace email. They only simply an additional communication tool. To get people excited about a new system, and to make sure they learn how it is being used and where it is succeeding, send out weekly update emails to your user base. Some people will take a long time to switch over to the new system. Weekly emails will keep them in the loop.
• Forget Dashboard - Use an RSS Reader - If you are a senior executive responsible for a whole cascade of projects, use a tool like Netvibes to monitor each of those projects. Skim the headlines. Click on the posts that seem to need your attention.
• Enterprise Digg - Cogenz is an example of a tool that you can use to help your people let each other know about interesting ideas.
• Folksonomy - Order Emerges from Chaos. And people will standardize on what keywords and tags to use to describe their articles. While it is important to give some structure, such as defining Worksite types, it is not necessary to dictate everything.

Source: How to use Blogs in the Workplace
by Rod Boothby

Here's a link to IBM's news release announcing the new Lotus Notes and Dominos platform and Attensa is honored to be part of the launch.

Out of about 50 companies invited to participate in the Lotus Notes 8 Beta 1program (codename: Hannover), Attensa is one of only a handful of independent software vendors participating in the beta.

IBM has been a pathfinder in bringing Web 2.0 technologies to business and Attensa, an IBM design partner, is supporting IBM’s vision by building a mashup called the HannoverDJ which we debuted today at Lotusphere.

The HannoverDJ is an easy to use tool based on the Attensa Feed Server and IBM’s Hannover Application that combines the power of activity based computing with Web feed technology to deliver the right information, to right people, at the right time for the right activity.

The mashup gives users -- the information DJs -- command over information coming from multiple information platforms that are interdependent, but often loosely defined and uncoupled.

The DJ can easily create custom information channels (custom feeds) by mixing disparate but highly relevant information sources (e.g., a leadership profile with a contact from the CRM, project specific Real Time Matrix filtered persistent search results with project milestones, deadlines and action items) into a single custom web feed. The information DJ simply selects the items from feed enabled information sources that are most relevant and creates a new “superfeed.” Creating superfeeds is a simple point-and-click task. The DJ channels the superfeed to people or teams needing the information.

Team members can receive, track and manage the information in a “River of News” feed reader in Notes. Time sensitive, actionable feeds can be channeled to Sametime instant messaging. Users can close the loop on activities by adding and updating the Activities server with a Sametime response agent provided by Vayusphere IM technology.

Response has been terrific. The DJ is a finalist for the IBM Lotus CTO award which recognizes (I'm quoting here. Even I can't make this stuff up.) "those visionary IBM Business Partners who are leading the charge in exploiting Lotus' latest collaborative capabilities in innovative, leading-edge, and exciting new ways. These best-of-a-kind solutions will be drivers in tomorrow's new markets, fostering innovation, and at an ingenuity level above the normal boundaries."

wow.

You can learn more about Attensa and our mashup partners here:

http://www.attensa.com/products/server/

http://www.attensa.com/news/2007/01/attensa_and_real_time_matrix_a.php

http://www.attensa.com/blogs/attensa/2007/01/attensa_real_time_matrix_searc_1.php

http://www.realtimematrix.com/index.php/newsblog/

http://www.vayusphere.com/

Divide and conquer.

Next week a large contingent (for a start-up anyway) of the Attensa team is heading to Lotusphere where attendees will get a sneak peek at some of the new features of Notes 8 and Domino 8. Peter O'Kelly of the Burton Group thinks, "it will be the most significant release of Notes in the last 10 years." He ought to know, prior to the Burton Group, O'Kelly led the product management of Notes R4 at IBM.

IBM has been a pathfinder in bringing Web 2.0 technologies to business, and Attensa is an IBM design partner. We'll be debuting a mashup of the Attensa Feed Server with some new IBM Lotus products, a splash of precision search from the Real Time Matrix and other tasty ingredients. Sorry for beating around the bush. I can't go into detail until next week. If you are heading to Lotusphere look us up. We're in booth 714. If you want to schedule a meeting contact Brian Mulvaney. brian.mulvaney [at] attensa dot com - 425.736.2261.

I'll be heading to the Enterprise Information Management 2007 conference in San Francisco. My sense is the content of this conference is right in the cone. (I worked with a guy who was a submarine captain. He used the expression and I have made it my own). The session titles are great. Witness:

The Born Again Intranet: How We Had So Much Fun Doing It, That We Did It Again

Making Search Smarter: Getting Only The Information That You Need

and my favorite: Welcome Reception & Cocktail Party For All Attendees

If you are heading to EIM 2007 look me up. I'll be in booth 6. If you want to schedule a meeting contact me directly. sniesen [at] attensa [dot] com - 503.544.1095. I'll be demonstrating a new version of the Attensa Feed Server that will be announced in February and a new version of Attensa for Outlook.

The Real Time Matrix's Jon Sofield and I spoke with Dennis Howlett about how precision persistent search can be used in the enterprise to filter signal from noise. Apparently we struck a chord based on his post on his blog AccMan: Solving the broken search problem.

I pulled this over from his blog AccMan

"How often have you searched on a term. only to find that 50-50% of what Google serves up is totally irrelevant? I reckon about 10% of my site traffic turns up by accident, largely because of a Google search...

I spoke with Scott Niesen, director of marketing at Attensa and Jon Sofield of Real Time Matrix the other evening to figure out what this means and how it works. Real Time Matrix, which, according to its blog is tapping into more than a million items per day, delivers only the news you want. This, from RTM’s site:

Conceptually, it’s pretty simple: take millions of live content feeds and correlate millions of preferences for content against them in real time. When an “item” matches within an acceptable coefficient, deliver it to any Internet-connected device.

In practice it isn’t though RTM has solved the riddle. Attensa turns this fine grained information into an enterprise RSS feed allowing the user to effectively mash up the most appropriate information required for the task in hand from any source."

In our conversation Dennis reeled of vertical after vertical where real time information is business critical. His list includes: brokerage house trading floors, pharmaceuticals, telcos, utilities and any business that want meaningful competitive and market intelligence. These businesses would all benefit from precisely honed searches that deliver "fine grained information" while eliminating irrelevant "cruff" ( in Dennis' parlance.)

We met Jeff Whitehead and Jon Sofield of the Real Time Matrix at the Office 2.0 conference in October. We quickly hit it off and it became clear to all of us that the work they are doing with precision search technology using real-time matching and filtering and our attention driven prioritization are a perfect fit for helping enterprise users cut through information overload.

Today, Jon and Jeff are launching iJ.am, a new breed of search engine (they descibe more accurately as a "matching engine and content router" that precisely matches and delivers personally relevant content from the web the instant it is published.

And today we are announcing our partnership with the Real Time Matrix. We're coupling our persistent search capability from within Outlook and on our Feed Server with RTM's sophisticated aggregation, matching and filtering technology to bring an indispensable research tool to our Enterprise customers. With the combined power of these search techniques business users can create precisely focused search channels that automatically and continuously deliver exactly the content they are searching for without duplication.

Jeff Whitehead says it best. "This technology cuts through information overload and puts control into the individuals' hands. Users simply set up and refine their search criteria and we deliver accurate, relevant and timely results with extreme prejudice."

With Attensa and Real Time Matrix researchers can search the past and filter the future by tuning their search criteria, in real time to deliver exactly the information they want without duplication, as soon as it is observed on the Internet.

Here are the specifics and next steps for our partnership.

First, we'll be adding the iJ.am search engine to the persistent search feature in Attensa for Outlook.

We will be adding persistent search and Real Time Matrix filtering to the Attensa Feed Server. With the new distributed admin feature, the power to create precision search feeds can be accessed by project teams throughout the enterprise.

Together with Real Time Matrix we will be offering custom integration for Enterprise accounts to tie Web and blog search with premium content and internal information search.

Here's the Attensa and Real Time Matrix partnership news release.

I've found there are generally two reasons for not blogging. In December through the first week of January I have been guilty of both.

Reason 1. You find your plate overflowing with multiple deadline driven tasks. In my case, it's a string of announcements that start today and will carry through the next several weeks. These are the result of heads down, nose to grindstone development work by the Attensa team and collaboration with our partners.

Reason 2. You are on vacation. I spent the first week in January in Mexico with my family kayaking in the Gulf of California. Incredible trip. Remote, stunning scenery and off the grid. Fishing, long meditative paddles, treasured time with my wife and kids, delicious food and happy hour. Now that's how I love to relax.

Check it out on Flickr.

I'm back and here we go.