Side benefits to event planning by Ron Lichty

One of the great side benefits of planning a panel for an event like the July 27 Architecting Community and Collaboration Solutions presentation is the opportunity to meet great minds, and I've met a few already.

Ten days ago, I met Tim Lundeen by phone. We were introduced by Harry Chesley, whom I invited to speak this month at SDForum's Software Architecture and Modeling SIG. Tim, who did Microsoft Works for the Mac back when integrated sets of home and small business applications were the rage, these days knows his way around the organizations and people implementing community and collaboration solutions, certainly in the Bay Area. His company, Web Crossing, is a supplier of community and collaboration solutions.

It was Tim who told me that Microsoft now mandates its product managers have support boards up and running before releasing new products, as a result of a study they ran showing customers 2.2 times more satisfied with the company and the products than when they provided telephone support alone. He told me about Edmund's, the auto buying service, and the ROI they're seeing from their community efforts. And we talked about my experience with Apple, and his with Cisco.

Nancy Frishberg introduced me by email to social architect Amy Jo Kim, who authored Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities. AJ says she's been focused on mobile game development for the past few years, so is not actively implementing community solutions with corporations. But she pointed me to...

Lee LeFever in Seattle. I sure wish we were doing this event there, because it would be a great excuse to tap Lee's mind, both from my own curiosity and for our audience's benefit. Lee, in his last experience as an employee, at Solucient, a health care industry data warehousing provider, had found himself helping hospitals figure out how reduce costs in their emergency rooms by sharing solutions with each other. He first implemented a Yahoo! Group, and when that achieved almost immediate success, moved them into a bunch of forums via Web Crossing.

Lee had found his passion. He’s a connector. He likes to facilitate networking, and to bring people information they weren’t aware of. "I'm from North Carolina: it's in my nature," he notes. He was soon "online community manager". "I couldn’t get over how excited, confident, and passionate I was about all that stuff," he says. He learned all he could there, then went independent, focusing on Social Design for the Web, what he thinks of as a new consulting specialty that he and a few other people are even now creating. Like my own company, Avenue A | Razorfish, he's not a technology-focused consultant, instead believing the key to making his consulting successful is understanding what clients really need.

Lee says companies have "a huge opportunity in opening their doors wider. Using message boards as one of primary support mechanisms can cut support costs in half," he says. "And a lot of the risks companies worry about are not born out."

Lee spent a year consulting at Boeing in knowledge management, one of the internal forms of this community/collaboration stuff, implementing online functionality to reconnect executives who had previously come together for leadership meetings only to return to the isolation of their home offices. He's been working on ShareYourStory.Org for the March of Dimes. He's developed message boards and blog elements for Geffen Records' fan sites. He's started to work with Microsoft around using blogs for IT professionals who use their enterprise solutions.

And he sent me URLs to some wonderful thinking he'd done on his blog about subjects like the difference between message boards and weblogs, and how to combine those two elements with wikis for organization, browsing and archiving.

Amazon: canonical community by Ron Lichty

Message boards to enhance support sites. Blogs to communicate with customers. Wikis to generate shared documents. Chat sessions where your company's notables can answer questions live. RSS to keep track of what other thought leaders -- and your competition -- is thinking.

But what's Amazon? (It's certainly a canonical example of one form of community and collaboration functionality!)

Isn't every Amazon product listing really a blog? Amazon puts up the product information (including print reviews) about a book or other product -- everything it knows and wants to share.

And then it invites comments. Which on Amazon are called "customer reviews".

Which is more or less a blog, yes?

Community / collaboration: Financial services??? by Ron Lichty

I made the sweeping prediction, in pitching the July 27 Architecting Community and Collaboration Solutions event, that "We predict virtually every business (as well as every nonprofit, church,and political campaign) will expand their online web presence to incorporate at least one and probably several collaboration and community solutions in the next five years."

Every business? Will that be true in financial services?

Certainly, the credit card associations may provide secure extranet collaboration opportunities with and among their member banks.

But that's business-to-business. How about consumers -- B2C? Is there a compelling role for community with and among bank, brokerage or credit card customers?

In conversations this week with colleagues at Schwab, Wells Fargo and Barclays banks, the formidable barrier of regulation repeatedly came up. When I was at Schwab, nothing went into print that an audience outside Schwab could see without intense scrutiny and approval from Schwab's Compliance department first -- not a technology white paper, not a JavaOne Conference slide deck, not a comment to someone else's blog.

Schwab did try out some online webinars. I don't know if public questions were allowed, but I'm certain they would have been highly moderated. Regardless, time-and-place events did not seem to fit well with the timeless philosophy of the web -- at least there didn't seem to be a rush to attend. (Of course, that was the era in which our investments were all making money. Maybe we just all thought we were already smart investors and not in need of help!)

Thoughts?

RIAs: An overview by Ron Lichty

I just saw a superb survey of Rich Internet Application technologies.

The venue was eBig's Web Development SIG (a recent name change from User Experience SIG).

The presenter was Luke Wroblewski, Lead UI designer for eBay, author of Site-Seeing: a Visual Approach to Web Usability, and principal of LukeW Interface Designs.

I was paying attention to the topic this month because its new chair, Cate Calson, at the suggestion of its first chair, John Armitage, had asked me if I'd talk. And this is the topic I'd have talked on. I wrote a detailed competitive analysis for Flex while I worked at Macromedia two years ago. I went to Schwab in '96 to manage development of the first rich internet application on Schwab.com in one of the only two available technologies at the time, Java. In my later Schwab role leading technology change across all of Schwab's business units, I was involved with three separate initiatives that looked for a better RIA technology, including a pilot with Curl. I'd given survey presentations of RIA technologies.

Luke did it better. Much better.

In his slides, he's got a great one early on that positions the major options graphically on a continuum, from Thin Clients, to Rich Internet Applications, to Rich Clients. And then a series of charts, one per solution, that lists advantages and disadvantages across the categories of User Experience, Deployment & Reach, Processing, Components & Customization, Back-End Integration, Unique Features, Future Proofing, and Staffing & Cost. In his presentation, he alternated between those charts and an example of each solution.

Luke was followed by Angelo Inanoria, VP Engineering and Sr. Research Engineer from JWay Group, presenting a solution that was new to me last month. JWay supplies XUI , a server-side tool, perhaps much like the Flex or Laszlo servers, that translates XML and Javascript, not to Flash, but to DHTML. More intriguing choices.

If you're interested in the architecture of this stuff, SDForum's Software Architecture and Modeling SIG, which I co-chair, will be focused on the topic of "Architectures for RIAs" at our June meeting June 22. Laszlo's chief architect Oliver Steele will lead off, based on his white paper, Serving Client-Side Applications. Isomorphic's chief architect Charles Kendrick will play off that, and compare and contrast AJAX solutions with Flash solutions. (Yes, I know, Laszlo can be re-targeted to an engine other than Flash. But until it is, it's a Flash-based solution.)

If, on the other hand, you're interested in the design side, Luke will be presenting the same night at Yahoo! He'll be talking at BayCHI's Interaction Design BOF Event on "Visual Communication Principles for Web Application Interface Design".

I realized the conflict tonight when I went to put his Yahoo! talk on my calendar.

Darn!

Offshoring solution to message board concerns? by Ron Lichty

I was telling a colleague about my prediction that "virtually every business (as well as every nonprofit, church,and political campaign) will expand their online web presence to incorporate at least one and probably several collaboration and community solutions in the next five years."

He looked at me a bit askance.

He was, not long ago, VP Eng for one of the largest consumer entertainment, home and personal software companies. So I gave him a couple examples of product company use. I told him the story I'd heard from Tim Lundeen that Microsoft now requires all product managers to have boards in place when they launch products. They'd done research that showed that customers who have both phone support and boards available are over twice as happy as those who have only call-in support.

I pointed out that the product support message boards on Apple's site -- while hardware instead of software -- had worked wonders ferreting out an "impossible" problem I'd had with our iMac. First, other iMac users reported the problem, letting me know I wasn't crazy. (I'd had random "Kernel panics" -- the white rectangle of death -- but only when a CD was in the INTERNAL CD drive but NOT in use.) Then an iMac user with the problem identified a solution. (Change the sleep settings, of all things.) Apple's warranty folks were nice enough, and their repair folks had replaced my CD drive -- to no avail, of course, despite their certainty that that would solve it. But it took another user to finally identified the odd combination of triggers that could provide a workaround to the fatal flaw and let the rest of us know.

My colleague was with me. It turns out he'd provided message boards for product support at his own company. But, he noted, somebody has to watch those message boards for miscreants -- the message board version of graffiti or spam -- and that's expensive. (Though in Apple's case, I doubt managing the boards is as expensive as all the CD drive replacements -- and motherboards, power supplies, and other components of other users before me who had my problem during warranty -- hardware fixes they did NOT have to make, thanks to one user providing others with a simple solution. Which is why Apple is smart and provides message boards.)

It also turns out my colleague had come up with a solution for the high cost of management as well. They'd outsourced to India the job of reading every message. The readers were somewhere near 100% at raising red flags to stateside management for anything that looked out of bounds.

Creating the Event by wiki by Ron Lichty

I've also put up a wiki to explore all the context for the event, as an experiment in event planning.

For the moment, only my event assistant producers -- my SIG co-chair and SofTech's program chair -- have access. But my intention is to expand from there to the moderator and panelists and perhaps wider again.

Bob Suess and I collaborated on the original event description via email. But the the event is advancing -- I'm inviting a moderator and panelists -- based on my own vision of the event. (e.g., 1) the event is about adding community and collaboration features to existing business, nonprofit, government and political campaign sites -- not about organizations whose business is this stuff, like LinkedIn or Match.com; 2) vendors can't adequately share the impact of this change -- for our panel, we must have solution builders who have seen dramatic results from implementing this stuff on their sites and ideally have been able to measure dramatic ROIs; and 3) what we want to talk about is how they identified appropriate community and collaboration features and then how they architected and evolved their solutions.)

So I'm putting all that context on the event wiki (I cross-posted some of it here in the More Event Details & Context entry, including some initial questions and some notes on ROIs that look good), and I've so far invited my assistant producers to join in -- to see if they agree with how I've put it and to tweak, suggest, edit, comment or otherwise attempt to improve it. "Do it. It's live."

This is an experiment for me, too. Including the "maybe someone will wreck it" worry. :=)

My thinking is that this truly could be a "groupware" kind of organic development of the event. We've used wikis very successfully to develop documentation. But is this an appropriate use, too?

Internal communities by Ron Lichty

I've been mentally classing internal community / collaboration solutions as KM -- knowledge management. But realized through some of the conversations I've been having via email and voice that my mental model has been much too "clean".

Certainly KM is a piece of internal enterprise community / collaboration solutions. And a necessary one.

Apple, in my last year there, '93-'94, was pressing Radar, its bug tracking system (!), to this use, making it a system in which employees could share their interests and knowledge bases with each other.

In the three-year initiative I ran at Schwab to transform application development from any-language-goes to a single cost-effective Java platform company-wide, my first hire was a webmaster. Fundamental to the challenge, it seemed to me, would be getting the organization to share and move toward common best practices, standards, tools, patterns, frameworks and other forms of reuse. That would require building a sense of being part of a Java community at Schwab. And that meant everyone would need to know who the other members of the community were and what they were doing.

We attempted to make our Schwab internal "Java Portal" comprehensive, with links to everything significant that was Java, both internally and externally. The first functionality on the Schwava Portal was a page that listed every Java project in the company, who worked on it in what capacities, what tools and application servers they'd used, and what approaches they'd taken. When we started, mid-'99, there were only a score of Java applications at Schwab and probably 40 developers. We went out and gathered data and had a static HTML page up with all that information in just two weeks. Three and a half years later, with 400 Java applications and a thousand developers, testers, project managers, and people managers involved with developing all of them, we were working in a virtual Java user group. We'd achieved our goal. By then, we'd coded and re-coded our knowledge base twice, and the "projects" section of the site had become a searchable, sortable database.

With the Event focus on blogs and message boards and wikis, it was easy to think of the software that supports internal communities at companies as being knowledge management software. But I was ignoring what I had just, over the weekend, thought through, when I listed email as one of the early community enabling solutions.

Intercommunication software is, in addition to KM repositories, also core to building community. At Schwab, even before we built our Schwava Portal, we'd created an Outlook group email list to include every Java developer (and later created similar email groups of managers and testers). And we started our initiative's email group from a group we'd started two years earlier, in '97, to facilitate creating our first Java developer community, an internal Java Developers Group.

And beyond email and other communication tools, the internal community/collaboration space includes groupware...

The tools core to internal enterprise communities are not so easily classed.

More links to thinking about community solutions by Ron Lichty

What is a blog, and can we describe blogging not in terms of what came before (as we now refer to “cars”, not requiring reference to “horseless carriages”).

More good community / collaboration links by Ron Lichty

These were dug up by Judy Bell at SofTech:

23 Success Stories using PmWiki software. As much a tribute to the usefulness of wikis as anything.

The challenges of choosing a wiki platform! So many wikis, so few complete.

Community / collaboration links by Ron Lichty

I'm finding fascinating reading to share with our audience on the topic of social software, specifically message boards and forums, blogs, wikis and RSS:

Introductions
"RSS Described in Plain English" by Lee LeFever, Common Craft.

"What are the Differences between Message Boards and Weblogs?" by Lee LeFever, Common Craft.

Wikis, blogs, message boards and social networks... Review of companies using them, review of the companies writing the software. It opens with the story of Ingersoll-Rand being clueless for days while word passed through the blogosphere that its seemingly indestructible Kryptonite bicycle lock could be undone with a Bic pen. Not monitoring blog coverage of its products cost an estimated $10 million for a lock exchange program and untold damage to its brand. --C|Net News.com, first published in TheDeal.com

2004 Howard Dean campaign coverage portrayed the role of technology in drawing together Dean's youthful campaign volunteers. --Samantha M. Shapiro, The New York Times

"The Internet Gives People a Connection -- and a Voice -- in Campaigns" --Matea Gold, December 21, 2003, the Los Angeles Times



How does one measure the ROI of an online community?
"Measuring the success of an online community” by Joseph Cothrel, Strategy & Leadership


Message Boards
A customer and developer support solution that integrates message boards and blogs (for interacting with customers) with wikis (for archiving ideas of ongoing value) by Lee LeFever, Common Craft.


Blogs
"Blogs Will Change Your Business" --Business Week

The legal implications of corporate blogging… by Ephraim Schwartz, InfoWorld


Wikis
The most widely known general-purpose successful wiki implementation, Wikipedia, a project to create a complete and accurate free content encyclopedia, entirely created and updated by users.

Try out a wiki youself, at the wiki sandbox.

How to set up a small wiki for purposes of your own.

Choosing a wiki platform (software and/or services) when you want to set up a WikiWikiWeb on your own servers.

More Event Details & Context by Ron Lichty

Architecting Community & Collaboration Solutions
San Francisco event: July 27, 2005, 6:30 - 9 p.m.

Joint sponsors:
* SDForum
* Softech
* Software Architecture and Modeling SIG of SDForum


First thoughts on key questions for the panel to address
* What brought them to implement community/collaboration functionality?
* How did they select a community/collaboration solution?
* How did they implement that solution? What challenges to doing so? What issues came up?
* Did they have to sell it internally? Was that hard? easy?
* What ROI did they predict? What results did they expect?
* What ROI did they see? What results did they see?


Context for this panel

Community software (defn): software that enables many-to-many interaction
--Joseph Cothrel, “Measuring the success of an online community”

Community software focus for this event:
* Message boards and forums
* Blogs
* RSS
* Wikis

Recently adopted applications that may enable community, depending on their use:
* IM
* online presentation software
* email groups
* meeting invite services

First generation of applications that enabled community:
* mail
* web portals
* message boards

NOT part of the topic for this panel: Social networking sites whose business is developing community.

This event is about the spread and imminent ubiquity of community and collaboration applications onto EVERY ordinary corporate, nonprofit, governmental and political web site. With perspectives from early adopter implementers who can tell us not only about doing it but about the results and ROIs.


Potential Positive ROIs
* cruise lines and travel sites give their guests opportunity to plan their trips, share best destinations and ports, and ask earlier guests what to see via discussion boards and wikis
* cruise lines and travel sites help potential customers find travel partners who share their interests
* manufacturers enable users to endorse their products (as well as share suggestions and ideas) online
* manufacturers and distributors provide message boards to let their customers provide a significant portion of customer support to each other
* Internet marketplaces enable buyers and sellers to exchange information, recommendations and endorsements
* Internet commerce site invite their customers to find common interest with each other related to the products offered on the site
* online information services enable discussion among their customers of information provided on the service
* corporations enable their employees to share best practices to improve processes, products, and services
* health clubs let members form affinity groups and find tennis, racketball and golf partners through the club
* bridal registries enable wedding guests to connect for gift buying -- and to leave messages for the bride and groom
* companies like IBM, Sun, BEA, Microsoft, Macromedia and Apple provide developer communities online


Calculating community ROI….
Here are some data points from four actual commerce-related online communities:
* Company A: Online community members are only 5 percent of the customer base, but make more than 30 percent of purchases.
* Company B: Average transaction size is twice as large for community members as for non-community members.
* Company C: Online community members are almost twice as likely to refer others to the site.
* Company D: Customer retention rates are 50 percent longer for community members than for non-community members.
--Joseph Cothrel, “Measuring the success of an online community”