OStatic

by Justin on Jun. 23, 2009

I'm skeptical.

As a general rule, whenever someone with a product to push begins talking about their competition, I rate the likelihood of anything resembling the truth and/or reality coming out of their mouth to be about the same as the likelihood of it coming out of the mouth of a traffic cop on the witness stand or the tobacco lobby at a Senate inquiry.

I'll grant that the tools in many corporate environments probably aren't the best options they could have chosen, but I think that's less about the options available being poor tools than it is about the executives who picked the tools having absolutely no clue of what they're doing. The larger the organization, the more likely it is that someone who has never done any of the jobs for which the tools are intended will be the one picking them out. When procurement decisions are based on the latest buzzwords, who had the best sales patter, or the entertainment value of the swag provided during the sales pitch, the chance that the final product will be of any use at all is about equal to the chance of winning the lottery jackpot. Twice. In the same week.

Now, maybe MindTouch has an amazing product, and it will solve all the problems of industry, pull the country out of the recession, bring back I Love Lucy for another ten seasons - with the original cast - and cure male pattern baldness, but I'm not betting my bippy. Much more likely is that it'll be one more option in the pool, and everybody will forget to hold Mr. Fulkerson to his promises of world peace and a hirsute male population.

Aside from general skepticism, there is one aspect I find particularly odd. There's a good bit of chatter there about social networks, including the interesting claim that they "only serve to treat symptoms of the problems businesses face." MindTouch is selling an intranet system - unless I missed a memo, intranet still means a company's internal network. I'm interested to know how exactly MindTouch is going to replace social networks with an intranet. That may well work for internal communications being conducted over Twitter, but I don't really see them reaching out to their customers, much less to prospective customers within the confines of an intranet system.

A cursory review of MindTouch's "10 Reasons to Choose MindTouch" reveals that it isn't replacing social networks at all - it's providing one more way to use what's already there. Mr. Fulkerson said himself that social networks are merely treating symptoms of the problems of business - what problems are those exactly, the problem of actually having to engage your customers? I don't particularly see having to make contact with my customers as one of the great problems of business; in fact, I see it as one of the things that actually makes the problems of business go away. In my opinion, social networks are far from being a second-rate hack holding business communications together until MindTouch can arrive like the technological Lone Ranger - they're a Godsend.

Perhaps what Mr. Fulkerson meant to say is, that the current ways of accessing social networks are only treating the problem of how best to engage with one's customers, and MindTouch sets out to provide a better way of accessing existing social networks in order to best reach one's customers. Surely if existing social networks were only facilitating one-way conversation with customers, the company's stated #2 reason for using their product wouldn't be because it makes it so easy to use those networks, and by extension, continue to perpetuate this one-sided monodialogue. Likewise, if blogs were such a problem, it wouldn't easily integrate with Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress, and if wikis were so dire an issue, it wouldn't include them. And for the love of all that is technological, their marketing literature wouldn't include lines like: "MindTouch's social collaboration software includes a broad range of technologies such as social bookmarking/tagging, ratings, voting, notifications, blogs, forums, threaded comments, etc."

In short, I don't think MindTouch or Mr. Fulkerson thinks for a second "that businesses do themselves a disservice by relying on existing social networking tools." I think they think the existing social networks are just dandy, and that the disservice businesses are doing themselves is to reply on existing social networking tools without MindTouch's software in the middle. Those are two very different things, and so are the things being said in his post here vs. those in MindTouch's puffing.

One last quote from Mr. Fulkerson: "Rather than focusing on socialization, one to one interactions and individual enrichment, businesses must be concerned with creating an information fabric within their organizations." Quite frankly, if having one to one interactions with customers - or between employees, for that matter - and promoting individual enrichment are bad business practices, then I'm going to shut down my three right now. Social networks aren't producing "one-dimensional superficial dialogue" - discouraging socialization, interaction, and enrichment is.

by Jesse Babson on Jun. 23, 2009

@Justin - wow - some solid thoughts. Well, this does bring to mind the salesforce.com campaign when they launched. They had an EVEN bolder claim - No Software!

It is true that the problem did not exist ONLY with corporate choice of software when Salesforce threw out their mantra. However, the business processes within companies to manage and deploy these huge projects was sucking the life out of companies. Failed projects and delayed projects were just not cutting it. This is why Salesforce is now a $1B business and has validated the SaaS model.

I am not saying that Mindtouch is the elixir. But there are way too many companies that have busted intranet offerings. Getting information out to the relevant stakeholders in a timely manner is still extremely challenging, and people are basically hopping outside the network and collaborating using tools like IM and Facebook. This does not even begin to get to the problem of liaising effectively with customers!

Mindtouch seems to be at least drawing awareness to the problem (I don't think much was required) and then proposing a set of tools (full disclosure - I have NOT used anything made by them). You can use a ton of Open Source tools out there to create your own solution - be it Drupal, Joomla, Jetspeed or whatever your poison. The larger question that is still begged is that if the 'social' paradigm is going to be the way of interaction, what should organizations do?

by Rion Morgenstern on Jun. 23, 2009

I understand that the concept of a collaborative network may be foreign to you. New concepts are often confusing because people attempt to see them in the context of the status quo. It’s OK - we’re here to help. From your rant I did see a couple opportunities to shed some light in a dark place.

First a clarification; A Collaborative Intranet is part of a higher order than a social networks. That order, being a Collabortive Network. This type of Intranet encompasses social elements, true, but provides efficiencies and measurable value that current social networks lack. At the end of the day we are all required to achieve a positive result in the context of the work palce. Twittering & Facebooking all day is not how people achieve results or how businesses efficiently run their internal operations.

Second, Mr. Fulkerson absolutely does believe that businesses are doing themselves a disservice by relying on social networking tools to conduct the operations. Business that rely solely on social networks add more to the distraction of people achieving results than they further their efforts – thus creating LIMITED value to the enterprise. We’re not saying that social networks are worthless, we are just saying that conversations are only a small part of a greater fabric. At the end of the day – people need to achieve TRUE results in the context of business. This is measured in terms like increased revenue, reduced operating cost, or higher revenue per employee.

The MindTouch Collaboritve Intranet is taking the limitation of existing social networks and adding true benefits: collaboration by federating content from across enterprise silos, such as CRM, ERP, file servers, email, databases, and web services. MindTouch provides an Intranet that is engineered with intelligence and delivers businesses HIGHER ROI and LOWER TCO than any other option in this space. The end result can be measured company wide according to traditional metrics of efficiencies.

by Justin on Jun. 24, 2009

"I understand that the concept of a collaborative network may be foreign to you."

My dear, I, like Lisa, am quite successful as a tech reporter. Collaborative networks are not foreign to me in the least - I have been working in this field since long before MindTouch existed.

I would suggest you go back and look at Mr. Fulkerson's statements, and read them, out loud, to yourself word by word. Look particularly at the one I quoted several times: "businesses do themselves a disservice by relying on existing social networking tools." That statement isn't unclear: It says, in very plain words, that using existing social networking tools is a disservice to business. Right there in the words. See them? I'll show you again: "businesses do themselves a disservice by relying on existing social networking tools."

Now, read the words from MindTouch the same way: "MindTouch's social collaboration software includes a broad range of technologies such as social bookmarking/tagging, ratings, voting, notifications, blogs, forums, threaded comments, etc." Those words are very clear too, but I'll repeat them again for you: "MindTouch's social collaboration software includes a broad range of technologies such as social bookmarking/tagging, ratings, voting, notifications, blogs, forums, threaded comments, etc."

Now, let me put both together for you: "MindTouch's social collaboration software includes a broad range of technologies such as social bookmarking/tagging, ratings, voting, notifications, blogs, forums, threaded comments, etc., which businesses do themselves a disservice by relying on."

Pick one or the other. Either using them is a disservice, or it's not. It's not half a disservice, or a quasi-disservice, it's a disservice or it's not. If you've got a better tool for using them, then say so. But don't expect us to be stupid enough to believe you have the great solution to the disservice of social networks when all your hocking is the corporate equivalent of Flock.

by Glenn Engstrand on Jun. 25, 2009

MindTouch looks interesting. Thanks for the introduction. I am downloading the community edition even as I write this.

I agree with Aaron. It's a big mistake for corporations to attempt to use consumer oriented social networking sites for the purposes of enterprise collaboration. This is a square-peg-in-round-whole approach.

Enterprise collaboration is still very much in its infancy. The fact that we have products billed as enterprise collaboration suites attests to this fact. I believe that "enterprise collaboration" will evolve into a feature set for any application instead of being its own category. There will come a day when "share" and "more like this" will become as common place actions for content as "save" is now.

If you find this to be of interest, then you will want to visit http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/future-of-work

by Jesse Babson on Jun. 25, 2009

Guys - I think things are being taken a bit out of context. To me, Aaron's assessment is that the current tools being used by the enterprises - PUBLIC social networking tools - are not the best fit. They were not streamlined for corporate communication, may very well violate compliance requirements, are not controllable (without getting into big-brother issues), etc. etc. The need for being more 'social', I don't think, is in doubt. How do enterprises adopt social technologies WITHIN their firewalls (or at least in a controlled/control-able env) is the question.