Optimal delivery of content can be achieved through a variety of methods, but it is generally a blend of security and filtering via meta data that can drive the most return with the least amount of upfront effort and ongoing upkeep. In a portal environment various platform components have their strong suits and by combining the capabilities of enterprise portal and content platforms much of the groundwork for personalization can be achieved in a configuration-based manner.

In our discussion we will cover terminology and concepts, example scenarios and technical implementation strategies to help showcase how personalization of content can be achieved within a portal.

Foundation

To lay a foundation for our examination, the following concepts and terminology will help us to convey how various layers of technology interact to ultimately provide personalization to end users.

Security and Filtered Delivery
It is important to understand what content is sensitive and needs true security, opposed to simply targeted, filtered delivery. There is often times some confusion that in order for content to be delivered in a personalized manner it needs to have certain security applied to it. Often times it is more the case that they a variety of content is actually accessible to a broad audience, but only portions of it make sense given the context of a particular group of users. Essentially this means that some of the personalization will be delivered implicitly (filtering based on metadata) and or filtered explicitly (based on security settings applied to the materials to be evaluated for delivery).

Coarse and Fine Grained Security
In traditional portal development there has always been a discussion of where and how security should be applied throughout a solution. To help visualize the strategy, security has been placed into two camps – coarse grained and fine grained. Coarse-grained security secures large portions of applications at a page or collection of related functionality level. Fine-grained security dictates what buttons can be seen by the end user based on their role and security groups within those applications. Fine-grained security is ideally powered by a entitlement server technology that centralizes and simplifies access to the management of this detail. Fine grained security can also be used to describe row level visibility within applications, which is one of the finest levels of granularity possible. For the purposes of this discussion we will be focusing on security just above the row level and higher, starting with individual content items and working our way to large sections of content and application functionality. Using the terms fine-grained and coarse-grained help to drastically simplify discussions around security and set the stage for discussing personalization of content.

Pages, Portlets and Rows
Taking the above concept and refining it, we can turn the above information toward our challenges around personalization. It is no different from the challenge of implementing a traditional security model, however unlike content personalization, fine-grained application security is a must and has to be addressed before applications are released to an audience, instead of being an added value to an existing system. For the purposes of the personalization that we are discussing above, it turns out that we end up generally concerned with page, portlet and row level considerations to implement an effective personalization model. The former two are considered coarse grained, the later fine grained.

Example Scenarios

For the best return on efforts to setup personalization it is critical to catalog the information and applications that we wish to deliver to end users. For each item provide a description, note the intended audience and the level of security needed for the item, identifying if it should be accessible only to a particular group of users or a specific user. The line items in the catalog allow the portal and content teams to understand if Coarse (Site, Page, Portlet) or Fine (User) grained approaches are needed for the various areas of content. A visual chart later in this article will further detail Coarse and Fine grained technical implementation approaches in relation to portal and content technologies. Please see the following examples that highlight this cataloging method (please note that all company names are fictional)

A. Bits and Bytes Software, LLC Sales Team

Business Need
In an effort to increase sales effectiveness, B&B Software would like to provide a collection of documents entitled Northeast Sales Enablement Materials to be will be delivered within their corporate intranet that are geared toward a sales team within a specific geography. Unlike a company salary report, this sales collateral does not need to be secured, but we will want to make certain that it is promoted directly to the intended audience. This will allow members of the Northeast sales team to quickly access this collateral directly within the context their portal experience in a regional sales dashboard, without having to browse or search for it.

Implementation Solution
The Northeast Sales Enablement Materials should have meta data applied to them or inherited from a parent folder that they may reside in that indicates the geography that they are intended for. In the example above the content can be delivered via a portlet(s) that queues off of a preference set at the regional dashboard level, noting the region that is active. This indicator could be the region that matches meta data on the collateral or a start node id for a folder that contains that region’s specific content. It would also be possible to use profile information from a sales user’s profile to pass to the display portlet, alerting it to the relevant region. To provide the highest level of flexibility the sales collateral should be stored in a content management system within regional folders, that roll up to a parent folder that holds all sales collateral. This will allow an aggregate view of the content to be easily displayed if needed.

B. Our People’s Genome, Inc Research Directors

Business Need
A team of research directors at a pharmaceutical organization need to collaborate on certain items that detail drug development road maps. This content, unlike the above, does need explicit security, in addition to being available in a personalized manner within the context of the director’s portal experiences. In this case both meta data and security can be applied to this content, both allowing it to be delivered to the correct audience. In addition to the roadmap materials the portal will provide more implicit delivery of personalized content, showing news that is related to key terms identified within the roadmap documents. Unlike the actual development road maps, this is public information, but highly relevant to assisting in development and provided to help the directors stay up-to-date with all relevant information.

Implementation Solution
The drug development documents will be stored in a document management system and will have explicit security applied to them, letting only research directors access them. Within the collaborative space in the portal a portlet will present items for collaboration based on the node in which the documents reside in the document management system. The user credentials from the portal will be passed to this portlet that surfaces the documents, to ensure that only documents a user has access to are displayed. The listing of documents will also return meta data about each item. This meta data can be broadcast to another portlet on the page (via WSRP2 or JSR 286) which will display related drug development news based on the meta data terms from the documents.

C. Yummy Foods, Inc HQ to Franchise Communication

Business Need
Yummy Foods has seen excellent year over year growth of their organization through its franchises, but has begun to struggle with providing relevant content to enable it’s franchises to continue to grow sales in their respective locations. In order to solve this headquarters has decided to provide all of their franchisees with various marketing, sales and performance information through an portal intranet solution. It is important to note that employees of a store also have some access to this portal. To reduce the burden on the store owners, headquarters has decided to provide standard benefit information and various employee forms in the portal as well. Sales materials for the store owners are designed to be deployed at a national level, but marketing plans are designed for particular geographies. The marketing and sales materials should only be accessible by store owners. The marketing collateral requires targeted delivered to the proper regions, so as not to confuse the franchises and have them follow incorrect plans, although they do have the ability browse to see what other regions are doing. The performance information needs to also be secured and will be delivered to the franchisees through reports that are only for a particular store. In order to motivate franchisees to perform at a higher level, general financial information is also posted that showcases the highest performing stores within the organization. Only franchisees should have visibility into to this performance information.

Implementation Solution
In order to service the franchisees and the employees the portal is logically divided into 2 sections, one for employees, another for owners. The content management system supporting the portal is also divided into two sections in a similar fashion. Within the employee section benefit materials are stored with open access, as all users can browse, search for and open this content (please note that security could be placed on these items if the materials varied by country and the franchise organization operated globally). The remainder of the materials above are all delivered to franchisees via a dashboard page within the portal. Based on profile data for a franchisee a portlet within the dashboard will display the relevant marketing materials. This portlet takes the profile information about the franchisees location and executes a search query, combining the geography with a node ID that indicates the search should focus on the marketing materials area. The sales materials are delivered in a similar fashion, but pass a user’s identity into the search, opposed to just a geography. This will allow the search to respect the security of a franchisee and ensure that employees cannot access the content. Top Franchisee Performance information will be delivered in the same manner. Finally, the Franchisee Individual Performance is retrieved in a similar fashion, but each performance document in the content system will be secured on a per franchisee basis and will be displayed only to a single user.

Technical Implementation of “Personalization” for Portal Content

The following chart outlines various levers to drive content personalization within a portal. Note the Coarse Enablers and Fine Enablers illustrate where potential attributes that can impact the granularity of personalization reside within the stack. Each layer of the stack can influence the one below, with the exception of the directory service layer, which should ideally be consumed by each layer to form a consistent security model throughout the stack. If this is not possible, various parameters, preferences and metadata can be sent to the content integration provider (portlet code) to allow it to still provide content based on what a complete security integration would actually provide.

click here to view a full size chart

Generic Portlet Types that Return Personalized Content
The following samples outline approaches displaying a listing of content from a content repository within a portlet for a particular audience or specific user. For most use cases, a single, generic portlet can be used to return the appropriate items that can leverage the points within the diagram above, exposed as parameters to be consumed by the portlet. The parameters can be bound to a starting node in the content system (starting folder) and or used along with a query against the system to return documents within particular meta data. On top of this the actual user context can be passed back into the content system, which provides the finest level of granularity to the results that are returned to the end users. If correctly written or natively available, a single portlet can be used to fulfill all of these examples and can be deployed many times within a portal instance, configured slightly different each time though preferences to meet a particular use case.

a. Region-based Content – Returns a listing of items from the repository based on what high level navigation area a user is in queuing off of an attribute of the particular portal area. This area would generally be a functional section of the business like sales, marketing, research, etc.
b. Region-based Content 2 – Portlet similar to that above that queues based on meta data associated at a page level within a business are to which it is deployed within and executes a query against the content repository to pull back related documents.
c. User-based Content – Portlet that acts as a generic delivery vehicle based on profile attributes tied to a user account that are passed into it .
d. User-based Content 2 – Secure via explicit user group security at the portlet level with the parameters pre-configured for the actual portlet that is delivering dynamic information that is based on a pre-defined query for that user group. As an example, the preference could contain an ID that indicates a node in the content system from which to display a listing of content items from.

Taking Personalization to the Next Level
With all of the above being said, personalization can be taken a step further with some innovative content delivery solutions that have the ability to weigh what content to display to end users based on their interactions with the systems, as well as other data available about the user. This technology is very similar to that of Amazon.com and can be used to power a series of decisions for content delivery that are driven by behavior, making a user more likely to find information that is specifically relevant to their needs. Without having to make a large deviation in business processes for content management or technical architecture, a tool like Oracle Real Time Decisions or similar technology can be injected into the above approaches at a portlet level to further filter what content may be returned to the end user.

Final Thoughts
Personalization of content delivered through a portal does not need to be complex and can often be achieved by leveraging existing attributes from the portal and user, rarely needed to get more involved for most content. The largest impacts of personalization are also generally seen by implementation solutions using coarse grained personalization methods with minimal effort. These small investments can have a large impact on usability within a portal, reducing the amount of time that users spend searching for information and increasing their satisfaction with the portal service.

As I have written many times on Infotechaligned – the only thing that matters is the ultimate business value that an application is delivering. The most value can be gained from even the most mundane technical solution.

How does one define a great technical solution?  The best technical solutions solve a business problem with the least amount of technical effort.  This includes effort from a full lifecycle standpoint – design, development, implementation, education, operation, maintenance and decommissioning of the solution.  A few years ago I worked with a company that demonstrated this point so clearly that I had to highlight it in this post.

This particular organization lends money to low income families at below market rates to aid them in home purchases.  For a few years they had been using portal technology that from a development standpoint was focused on business users.  This technology required little programming to allow them to further develop their extranet and intranet environments that connected their customers on the lending and purchasing sides of their business.

A need arose within the organization to provide executives with a summary of call activity from their sales team to judge the effectiveness of various calling campaigns.

The IT team spent time deliberating over what course of action to take to solve the business problem.  It was decided that the executives could be best served via a dashboard that would roll up various pieces of performance data around these calls made by the sales team and surface the information via their existing intranet.

The following two options were arrived at assuming that the requirements gathering for the solution was already complete, irrespective of the technical solution

Solution 1

Extend their base CRM system to support tracking this data and develop an integration to aggregate and present the data.  This solution would require the following development efforts

1. Extend the data model of the base system to account for the new reporting needs
2. Develop a presentation layer to gather the relevant information for the business users based on this data model
3. Create a presentation layer to allow executives to view and sort the information
4. Integrate the presentation layer into their intranet
5. Complete a quality assurance cycle on the solution and resolve any issues found with the technological implementation

Solution 2

Use an out of the box – MS Access like – portal component that is already available to capture and present the information.  This solution would require the following development effort

1. Configure the data model and forms relevant for the data collection around the business needs
2. Configure the presentation layer for the end users to expose the required reports

The above comparison might be deemed biased, but it is important to note that in the 2nd solution data would now be entered into two distinct systems by the sales team and the organization will not have complete control over the presentation format beyond a series of basic, caned reports.

After lengthy deliberation the IT team was strongly in favor of using the first solution due to it giving them full control and confining all sales team activity to the CRM system, but estimated the time to completion at around four months of effort.  This effort would detract from having their developers work on core offerings within their extranet to drive business leads to the sales team.  The development and QA time, not to mention possible adjustments that may be needed after an upgrade of the underlying system also added to the overall “cost” of the integration.

The first solution would require around 8 hours of effort to configure and 10 minutes from the sales team each week to summarize their call activity, which would be required regardless of the technical solution selected.  It would be created on top of an out-of-the-box technology and require almost no quality assurance testing, but require the sales team to end their day outside of their CRM system and leverage the intranet for summation of their calls.

In a perfect world we would have the deep integration of the first solution, married with the ease of development within the second solution. Unfortunately that was not feasible and the business team was requesting a solution as soon as possible from IT.

Ultimately the IT team went with the second option.  If more complex needs arose that the configuration based solution could not meet they would have to revisit the solution, but for now they were able to meet 100% of the business needs with this stop-gap effort in a very short time span.  Given the limited effort and accuracy in addressing the problem, this had tremendous positive impact with the business.

This example of success is perhaps one of the most powerful, pragmatic solutions that I have come across in my enterprise software work.  This is an extreme example, but hopefully there might be a space within your organization that allows you to provide this same level of success with minimal effort.  Using simple, configuration-based approaches to development whenever possible is an outstanding way to provide value.  They may at first seem too lightweight and due to their technical ease may be overlooked at first pass by a development staff, but never count them out for their ability to provide a big win for your business teams.

Organizations are beginning to recognize the value of deploying consumer Web tools to obtain basic benefits like internal knowledge sharing. This being said, they often overlook deeper benefits that the elements, and, more importantly, their methodologies of collaborative contribution can provide. Due to their ease of use, organizations can leverage these tools to allow for natural participation within their traditional application-development processes, allowing both developers and business analysts to jointly contribute to solution development.

Natural participation is an agile, cost-effective, and logical participation model made possible by portal or portal-like frameworks that let business analysts design processes, content, structure, and other elements of a solution in parallel and in participation with a traditional software development team. A tremendous amount of business value can be gained from the speed, ownership, and maintenance in a solution-delivery model that stresses participation of the business units involved in creating the overall solution, while not relying exclusively on a development team to carry their vision to completion. Natural participation can be thought of as “Agile Development Plus” to further accelerate overall solution delivery.

As an example of how natural participation could be applied to a non-technical task, imagine multiple participants actively assisting in creating a painting on canvas. Based on their strengths, the participants would contribute their various degrees of skill and help where it made sense. Perhaps a particular team would focus on painting trees from a template to free up the highly skilled artists to work on the complex and unique details of the people in the painting. When the work was done, viewers would appreciate a single painting for its overall qualities, not knowing that multiple authors with various competencies were involved.

Whether developing an online mortgage application or a business-to-consumer Web site, this participatory method is made possible and effective by leveraging Web 2.0 principles of contribution.

The Frozen, Monolithic Past

Applications have historically been deployed by IT teams based on the waterfall development model, which results in monolithic, often cumbersome solutions. All elements of an application have been controlled by the development team including textual content, taxonomies, site structure, surveys, dashboards, and other elements. Although many great solutions have been built this way, unfortunately it has cast the development team as the bottleneck.

Here are some drawbacks of the traditional development model:

• The team is slow to react to business needs.
• The development team becomes the bottleneck for initiatives.
• There is more code to maintain.
• There is more code to test.
• Regression testing is needed for application updates.

It we take the monolithic model to its extreme, it could take weeks to adjust the destination of a simple hyperlink within a Web-based application. If an item of content needs to be changed or the structure of the site requires adjustment, the development team is always tasked with this effort, reducing available resources for other projects. A series of regression tests may also be needed to ensure that the application is able to continue functioning without being affected by the recent change.

Once again, many outstanding solutions have been developed this way, but we can all agree that this process is not without significant drawbacks.

Passing the Baton

Members of application development teams take great pride in delivering solutions to the business, and rightfully so. They have worked hard to gain thorough insights into complex systems that they weave together to meet the needs of the business. This can also make it difficult to relinquish control over portions of applications and move to a more iterative, natural participation model of development.

When it comes to control, it is only logical that concerns over development efforts running wild without the steady hand of IT would abound as business analysts begin to have further levels of participation. To combat this fear, enterprise vendors have been careful to not overlook governance and security controls, establishing approval processes, appropriate access, and auditing possible within their new tools.

Once IT realizes that their efforts are best spent focusing on high-value strategic tasks to drive their own efficiencies and cost reductions, resistance to this change falls away.

The Big Thaw: Natural Participation in Action

A fictional corporation called Blue Walnut Realty (BWR) had a public Web site that allowed customers and business partners to connect with them at www.bluewalnuthomes.com. The Web site had a public-facing section that contained marketing material to help generate sales leads and showcase their services. In addition, the site had two secure areas that allowed home builders and home buyers to access an online application.

The customer application helped potential home buyers keep track of favorite properties that they were interested in purchasing. The secured home builders section of the Web site let builders add and update their property listings within the BWR database so that potential customers could browse and add these property listings to their favorites.

Historically, BWR had used the waterfall development method to support these applications and had released new functionality or adjustments to their Web site on a bi-yearly basis. All development efforts were handled by their development team, which met with business analysts to transform the latest business requirements into solutions.

Over time, BWR had seen their growth slow as smaller, more nimble competitors began to offer similar functionality on their Web sites and more quickly adjust to meet consumer needs.

Recognizing that their Web presence was a crucial element of their overall business strategy and that it would help them grow their business, the BWR CEO and CIO committed to investing in a more flexible Web framework and to researching ways to leapfrog their smaller competitors. To support this new business initiative, BWR also revisited their development processes and began investigating agile development methods. During their investigation, they came across the principle of natural participation in this new framework and decided they would also leverage its methodology.

The results were significant. By adopting a natural participation method of solution development, they quickly found themselves accelerating their initiatives at speeds they hadn’t thought possible. With developers and business analysts collectively contributing in parallel, which was not possible earlier, the same number of resources could now produce much greater results in a shorter time span.

Within a week of moving to the new platform, a new feature was added to the Web site that allowed potential home buyers to start a discussion with BWR staff around potential homes on the same Web page where they stored their favorite listings. This added a much more personal touch to the Web site, and the potential customers were very pleased with the new functionality. The development team invested no effort on this initiative as the business analyst team used native framework tools to create the new interactivity for the prospects.

BWR also wanted to strengthen relationships with the home builders. Immediately after adding the discussion forums, the business analyst team began to weave in targeted marketing materials explaining the benefits of working exclusively through BWR alongside the application that home builders used to add and update their listings. In addition to these materials, the team created specific contact forms to allow the builders to show their interest in specific programs offered in the marketing materials.

A few more weeks down the road and using native portal tools again, the business analyst group set up individually branded logins for all of the major builders to bolster relationships with them. This required no developer assistance or regression testing from the development team as it was native framework functionality. The individually branded logins were something that none of their competitors offered, giving BWR a distinct advantage.

What about the application development staff at BWR? Throughout this entire process, the development team had been freed up to focus on more strategic technology projects. They are now preparing to release a new tool within the site that allows potential home buyers to download their favorite available properties to a GPS device that can easily guide the prospects through a tour of the properties. This is a feature that no competitors have and something that was made possible by using the time not spent updating site content, adding new interactive site elements like the discussion forums, updating site structure, building uniquely branded login areas, or deploying marketing materials for the builders.

How to Implement Natural Participation

Leveraging principles of natural participation requires coordination from a business and organizational standpoint, as well as from a technological standpoint. There is no perfect approach to its implementation, but the overall goal is to obtain benefits from a pragmatic, agile approach to development with multiple parties. Below are some key steps that will help organizations begin to embrace this ideology for projects.

1. Secure executive sponsorship — Change is difficult. Even though many benefits exist from implementing a model of shared participation for solution development, it will take a compelling executive voice to reinforce the new strategy. In the absence of this support, people will gravitate toward the status quo where they are comfortable.
2. Know all facets of your application framework — It is crucial to look for areas within a development framework where non-developers can contribute and manage part of a solution. This frees developers to focus on more crucial initiatives and frees the business from the bottlenecks of waiting on the completion of long release cycles to make minor adjustments to a project.
3. Challenge the current Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and release management approach — Too many companies do things “because that is the way we have always done them.” Step back and examine if a traditional model makes sense given the evolution of platforms and their ability to now develop more modular solutions where multiple audiences can manage different segments of a project.
4. Explore delegation and define governance — Just because a development team may no longer code an entire solution does not mean that it has to result in a loss of control over content. Modern development platforms can provide workflow, auditing, and other methods of managing segments of a solution in a secure and controlled manner.
5. Identify obvious candidates for delegation — Content, information structure and layout, high-level security, and workflow are just some elements that business users can manipulate within a platform. The business can focus on these portions of a project without affecting development efforts and offloading a significant amount of work from a development team.
6. Keep all parties informed — The development and business teams should participate in regularly scheduled, brief meetings to inform each other of their project activities at a high level. This will ensure that any change in overall project direction or business requirements will have minimal impact on the work that both parties are doing and how that work is integrated between them.

Conclusion

By leveraging the principles of natural participation, it is possible to thaw enterprise application development, making the most of a portal framework and native tools that enable contribution by non-developers. Each initiative can be evaluated as to whether it makes sense to begin traditional development work for a segment of the solution, or if it is possible to involve members of the business-analyst team to paint that part of the picture. This process leads to greater business agility and allows development teams to focus on higher-value strategic tasks, while business analysts become empowered to “naturally participate” in the overall solution development and increase the business value that IT can offer to its organization.

In this exploration we address the latter of these two scenarios, in which business user empowerment allows knowledge management solutions to quickly be constructed and the barrier to effective knowledge work to drop within an organization. People are hard pressed to deny the “cool” factor of these new tools, but these suites inherently pose some tough, critical questions about their business value. Between the practical application of these technologies, challenges around governance and security, and issues around education and adoption, it is easy to see where an organization has to think long and hard about implementing these tools and ask important questions:

• Where do these tools fit into the enterprise?
• How can we govern the usage of these tools and manage the data generated by these tools?
• How do we leap the user education hurdle?
• How can these tools generate business value, thereby justifying a potential deployment?

Once you are able to address these points and understand what makes sense for your enterprise, you can identify where these product sets can provide value. You’ll be able to see that harnessing these tools makes it possible to accelerate knowledge work through the capture and presentation of information through user-authored spaces. It will also be possible to calculate an objective return on investment by measuring key performance indicators that satisfy the justification for the toolsets. Ultimately, this allows you to unlock value from enterprise knowledge management for your organization, granting you new levels of knowledge sharing and efficiency.

Fitting Into the Enterprise

A medium- to large-scale enterprise has an electronic mail solution along with a host of vertical applications implemented to address core needs like procurement, financials, and other common line-of-business needs. These tools run the gamut in the way they allow users to produce and manage an organization’s data.

Email is the essence of unstructured data and, conversely, vertical applications manage and host rigidly structured data. In organizations where knowledge work is occurring, these tools fail to provide a platform to act as a workspace to facilitate the dynamic, ad hoc collaboration around business challenges.

Although written from a sales and marketing standpoint, Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail details dormant economic value that goes unaddressed by large systems. Only when a vehicle exists to cost-effectively address niche needs will this value ever be realized. We’re continually presented with projects that have technical solutions falling somewhere between unstructured email and highly structured vertical systems like SAP. Enterprise 2.0 collaboration technologies support the needs in this middle ground that never could have been managed or cost-effectively addressed before.< /p>

This middle ground, or “whitespace,” has traditionally implied custom development effort, and generally it took six to eight months to develop a solution for even the smallest of business problems. When business users need a tool to manage this middle ground, it is not feasible to justify custom development, and the business makes use of the only tools at hand to tackle the problem. These have traditionally been email and other tools that are not well suited to knowledge management work.

User-driven product suites shine under these circumstances and provide a framework for teams to quickly create and manage these situations. When business users are able to identify a need that the traditional application space does not address and quickly satisfy those needs with these toolsets, value is realized because they do not need to engage development resources from the IT arm of the organization; instead, they can respond at near real-time speed. This allows IT to focus on more strategic projects around their core business that do require precious resources, and business users can work efficiently within a managed space in the enterprise.

Governance

With highly dynamic collaborative tools, mitigating fears of misuse is not a trivial matter. Within most organizations, any electronic information outside of email and casual office documents requires some degree of formal regulation.

Often, a battle ensues between business teams and technology management teams as to how best to use the tools. To make the most of the toolsets and to obtain the greatest business value, a reasonable, but not overzealous, level of governance must be placed around them. When we think of governance within a highly dynamic collaborative environment, some basic principles can be followed to smoothly manage the processes, while still allowing business users to create value.

Like a traditional IT initiative, obtaining executive- or departmental management-level sponsorship is crucial to the success of the initiative. Just because the toolsets enable fast solution development does not reduce the need for sponsorship. In addition to the sponsorship, the purpose of the deployment needs to be clearly defined. It is not enough to deploy a project with the toolset just because of the features available within the toolset. Feature-driven projects are destined to fail.

After the solution is in place, it will need to be maintained. This means that a clear owner must be defined for the outputs of the project. This owner will need to obtain any requisite training to support and enhance the solution going forward.

Based on the purpose of the deployment, it is essential to identify what information will be committed to these spaces. Will a space contain information that is sensitive and in need of being secured? Who will have access to modify, edit, or add information to this space? What level of auditing needs to be put into place? Knowing the answers to these questions upfront will allow you to set up the correct access permissions to enforce business policies within the workspace.

Finally, a plan for periodic review of the project’s outputs needs to be defined. This review acts as a checkpoint to make sure that not only technical but also business process rules are being adhered to. The review should also contain procedures and metrics that measure when a space should be discontinued due to nonuse.

Outside of security, at the end of the day, much of the governance with toolsets that pose a low barrier to entry will boil down to business processes. People in organizations need to be responsible for their actions at a business level beyond the technology. This is where a clearly defined plan based on the above elements is crucial if people are to succeed with enterprise 2.0 technologies.

Education

User-driven products that provide expedient gratification with regard to the reduction of daily burdens and processes have exceptionally high levels of adoption. Public examples of such systems underscore this trend, including the social networking site MySpace and blogging tools like Blogger and WordPress; these are definitive examples of tools that self-educated users have quickly adopted and gained value from, without extensive formal education.

The low barrier to usage can be attributed to the toolsets’ small, but often highly used feature sets. For users experienced with complex enterprise applications, this is a refreshing change. At first seemingly confining, the limited feature sets allow for maximum usability. Tools like Basecamp from 37signals also embody this ethos, providing a small, but often used feature set. This drastically reduces the need for education and increases the rate of adoption and speed at which value can be delivered.

That being said, it is beneficial to offer formal training classes to outline the available functionality of the tool and review how it might be applied through an examination of a series of use cases in order for the end users to obtain the greatest benefit. Once an initiative has been able to conform to the governance requirements for a project, a quick boot camp-style training curriculum led by an experienced user or company teacher is an excellent way to jumpstart the project in an effective manner with minimal resources.

Value

Given the current unmanaged whitespace within organizations, these tools provide substantial value from both a business and information technology management standpoint. Business users are able to realize new value by quickly reacting to their current and emerging business challenges, and authoring solutions for them. Blogging and wiki-style mechanisms provide an excellent platform to facilitate knowledge transfer and knowledge management not possible before, allowing for the actualization of all-important tacit knowledge. Information technology management groups can benefit from cost savings by consolidating some existing, moderately used applications and from a never-before-possible degree of auditing within the whitespace.

Complex decision making

Tools that allow the business to paint a canvas of dynamic collaborative functionality allow for an endless possibility of “applications” to be created. Imagine a situation in which a major decision needs to be made among a number of players from across the business. The decision might hinge on information from a CRM, ERP, or custom application. This critical data can then be incorporated into a space where users can contribute to a wiki or share documents and various other artifacts around the data to ultimately make a decision or select a strategy on the matter. This would have historically happened in a disjointed way across email where the process would take longer and the knowledge work potentially would be lost beyond the final decision.

Collection of tacit knowledge

The creation of a low barrier to the collection of tacit knowledge cannot be understated and can have a direct impact on the bottom line of a business. Imagine a vendor consulting group that is helping to increase product sales. Ensuring their field methodologies, such as best practices and critical product issues, are easily captured and shared among resources, can have a direct impact on deployment success. This deployment success translates literally to increased customer satisfaction, which, in turn, increases product sales.

Value through iterative contribution

User-driven authoring really shines when we examine how quickly we are able to realize value throughout a project. User-driven collaborative frameworks accelerate the time in which business value is delivered due to the ability to iteratively author. Unlike building with traditional software, requirements do not need to be completed for the business to begin constructing a solution. This allows business users to continuously focus on small, high-value components, which lets them realize value early and often throughout their process.

Cost savings and control

As IT departments attempt to keep costs down and monitor what transpires within their systems, controlling application sprawl is a top priority. We can look toward these new tools to act as a platform for consolidation of existing, lightly used legacy applications. This reduces cost not only from a server perspective, but also from a code maintenance perspective. Potential “would have been” custom development initiatives can now be handled through the framework. This can also stunt ongoing development maintenance costs as development efforts can now be directed at furthering core elements of the business and not providing the “one off” solutions that the user-driven collaborative suites now fulfill.

To measure the value that the suites deliver, key performance indicators such as email usage, the amount of resource and time to onboard a new employee, and the length of time to resolve a problem or complete a research assignment can all be captured. Additional quantifiable justifications can include servers and the knowledge, staff, and time to maintain many small, infrequently used systems.

Final Thoughts

Enterprise 2.0 collaboration suites are an investment in an organization’s production capacity. The possibility of being able to harness and navigate whitespace within organizations through business user-authored environments is an exciting, powerful vision. To drive these efforts and expose new business value, both education and governance must form the pillars that the newly created solutions will stand upon. In addition, a business champion must be able to firmly grasp these concepts and understand that value will not be delivered on the basis of the toolset’s features, but on solving key business problems and using the toolsets to manage the solution. With this foundation we are on our way to unlocking the value of enterprise 2.0 collaboration technologies.

* Originally published on BEA System’s Arch2Arch 03/05/2008

Over a series of various online community and corporate intranet deployments, heuristics have emerged as to what will make the community a “success” and provide a return on the investment. These heuristics can be used with a broad array of deployments within your corporate platform to gauge what business value is created for the end users of the platform.

These guidelines can be condensed into a workbook format to help us to understand and prioritize development activities on the basis of the value that they provide. The workbook includes a series of questions that fall into five basic categories outlined below.

• Content – knowledge workers require access to various documents and materials that are analyzed and synthesized in order to perform their job functions.
• Process – a task or series of related tasks that can be represented as a workflow that workers need to interact with at some frequency in order to perform their job functions.
• Access – can potentially present a barrier to use if complex or redundant authentication to systems is required.   Conversely, if multiple systems become available from a single authentication value in the form of time savings can exist.
• Application – various line of business systems are critical to employee’s ability to perform their jobs.   This category relates to these tools that are often specific to collecting and referencing data for a particular department or job function.
• Time – acts as a well understood, easy to convey metric to evaluate possible savings from projects.*

*Please note that this workbook will only touch lightly on time savings.  Time savings is a byproduct of various efficiencies that an intranet potentially offers users.  The workbook focuses on the underpinnings of what delivers the time savings.

The workbook has a variety of line items associated with each category. Within each category there are groups of line items that need to be marked with a y or n indicating if they are applicable. For each group select only one line item can be answered. As the workbook is completed a running tally is displayed in the upper right hand corner of the sheet. If when finished the score is above zero – the project that you have outlined will provide solid business value and give your end users a compelling intranet space.

Download Intranet Success Workbook

I would be interested in feedback on the workbook, as there are many additional line items that could be added.