Informationoverlord

I am sad to see Google has called it a day on Wave, but I am not surprised. According to Google:

‘Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.’

It has not seen the user adoption for one reason in my view – it doesn’t work in Internet Explorer natively, and most corporate IT departments will not let their staff download and install the Google Chrome Frame to make it do so. This is important, because I do think some tech people do tend to forget that for most of us in the corporate/business world, we don’t have a choice of browser to use – or even version of that browser to use (see UK govt announcement last week that plan to carry on with IE6 on most of their machines). The larger the organization, the less likely you will be to customize IE in anyway, with IT departments/security taking control of most of your settings too.

I could have used Google Wave in my work environment, it would have been a faster way of collaborative working than a wiki and the IM aspect of it would also have been useful in some of the project teams I have worked in. But, I exist in the world described above. I could not use Wave at work, and frankly I didn’t need it at home – although I did try it out on a number of occasions and whilst it was not the most intuitive thing going, I liked what they were trying to do, even if for the most part it seemed like a solution looking for a problem, rather than something designed to solve a problem that already existed.

So, hats off the Google for trying it, but creating something that has most use in the enterprise, and doesn’t work natively on the browser of choice of the enterprise, meant that for me it was always doomed to failure.

Thanks to James Mullan and Headshift for bringing my attention to this must read post of Capgemini’s ‘Capping IT Off’ blog entitled ‘4 Myths about blocking Internet access in the enterprise’

The post echoes comments I made in my post from last week ‘Why ‘wasted time’ is wasted column inches’ about just why blocking access to and banning social networking and other sites from the workplace is counterproductive and, frankly, stupid.

Rick Mans’ 4 myths are:

His conclusion is simple - TALK with your employees. “You only block Internet access when you are afraid to talk with your employees about their behavior. Preventing behavior does not solve your problems, it will prevent them just for a short period of time.”

I could not agree more.

[What does make this amusing however is the number of comments on Rick’s post about Capgemini’s policies re internet access. Seems maybe they don’t share Rick’s approach on this one. Sort of, do as I say, not as I do].

I was alerted, by James Mullan , to a post on social software adoption in law firms on Michael Idinopulos’s blog.

Michael’s view is that most law firms take exactly the wrong approach to social software rollout. “They try to “chip away” at social software implementation by starting with “easy” use cases like know-how. In my experience, however, firms are most successful when they introduce social software right into the heart of their business: Client-specific collaboration.”

First off, I’m not sure I would call the know-how use case ‘easy’, as in practice it tends not to be. Secondly, there really isn’t as much client collaboration as people outside of law firms tend to think there is, which is why client extranets and deal room platforms have tended to be regarded as being unsuccessful over the years. . I will admit that these expensive platforms can now be created cheaply, and for lawyers and their clients working on a draft of an agreement, there seems little reason why this could not be done via a wiki, with the document formatting done at the end of the process.

This adoption is likely to be client lead though, with specific clients asking the law firm to work this way, rather than the other way around. Indeed,what is perhaps more interesting is that clients are now wanting more access to their law firms knowledge - with many wanting some form of access to a firm’s know-how. This makes finding ways to make that know-how more accessible, structured, and current more, not less important.

I also think the post makes the mistake of equating success of law firm social software adoption with lawyer adoption. Around half (or more) of most law firm staff are non lawyers/support staff/business services staff. The use of social software can greatly enhance the way many of those staff do their jobs within the firm, which in turn will provide benefits to the firm as a whole. For example, even something as simple as using a wiki page for online meeting agendas and subsequent meeting minutes writing up, can cut down on email traffic and save time.

I would, however, agree with the point Michael makes about self interest. Indeed I would go as far as the say that this is the key to social software adoption, full stop. The way most people see the value of things such as tagging, social bookmarking etc is when they can see the value to them - not the value to the firm or anyone else: if they can see the added value to the way they work and operate they will then adopt something and the by-product of that is the wider benefits that can be derived from that self interest. Encouraging people to care about personal information management can help bring about a social software revolution.

Well, it seems it has taken Google around 20 months or so to merge Jotspot into the land of Google and so we have Google Sites. Perhaps wisely Google are avoiding using the term wiki for the platform, and are just highlighting functionality. So why am I yawning?

Jotspot was a inventive and different attempt at bringing wikis to the masses. It was certainly not perfect, but as someone who used it for around ten months almost daily, it had a lot to recommend it. The Google purchase was a bit annoying, but the hope was that things would be turned around quickly and it would be all smiles. Their communication with existing jotspot users was quite dreadful, even now there seems little word at migrating their content to google sites - probably because most of the useful stuff on jotspot wont be supported by google. So far, so very underwhelmed. It is also a pain in the arse to sign up for.

Some are saying that this is google’s attempt to take on Microsoft’s sharepoint. I don’t think MS are going to worried on the evidence thus far.