This group will focus on social business use cases and application of those use cases to standards, standards improvements, and standards gaps. Initial conversations will be based on the W3C Jam Results recommendations:
http://www.w3.org/2011/socialbusiness-jam/report.html
This group will not produce specifications.
Group's public email, repo and wiki activity over time
Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these
conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.
At the group meeting yesterday, it was decided to have a 2 week review period (ending August 6) of the current draft, after which all comments will be addressed and a final version will be created for publishing. We will set time on agenda for August 7 meeting for discussions needed if any on review comments received.
Please review the white paper and share any comments with the group via mailing list ( internal-socbizcg@w3.org )
We are executing on our mission to “gather practical, business oriented, use cases focused on high value transactions to influence and improve existing social standards in order to foster the growth and adoption of social standards in enterprise solutions.”
Today we publish the first 2 use cases in our queue.
One applies social concepts to improve a business process found in all companies – procurement. This use case addresses a typical challenge – it is impossible to identify all relevant parties who could improve or accelerate a process, ahead of time. The Business Process Visibility Use Case
The second explores social patterns applied to software development (DevOps). Using relationships across people and systems to improve communications of significant events in the product development process. The Continuous Integration Use Case.
Although very different use cases, they both employ social business standards, and identify standards requirements that are now being explored with the relevant standards organizations.
Join the W3C Social Business Community Group to contribute and partner on social business use cases
If you have any questions, please contact the group on their public list: public-socbizcg@w3.org. Learn more about the Social Business Community Group.
Work is under way on use cases as well as a Rapid Start Guide to help with understanding how any company might start and succeed with social business technologies. Look at our wiki to find the use cases and/or working draft of the Rapid Start Guide.
The group has established a regular meeting schedule (see Events) and are starting to process the contents of the W3C Social Business Jam results paper (see Wiki).
The Social Business Group is just now forming and I’ve heard from several future members that they are going through their company’s internal processes to join.
If you are considering joining us, I’d like to provide a few details that might be helpful to you.
You can read more about the W3C Community Group process here:
The community group process is free and does not require W3C membership.
To join this group, click the “Join This Group” button on the group home page and accept to the lightweight IP agreement.
Since this group is brand new, there are several “start up” activities to take care of. We need a charter to set the bounds of the group, define how we operate, to define how this group interacts with other community groups and other standards organizations, etc. I will propose a draft charter – perhaps at the first group meeting (more on the first group meeting a bit lower in this wiki post).
During group formation, it was proposed we take a look at the W3C Social Business Jam Results Document and the list of recommendations for next steps in that document. The results document can be found here:
It has also been proposed that this group work on common social business use cases and best practices with an eye on how this information affects any existing standards or highlights the needs for new standards in the social business space.
If there is an operative word for this group, it could be “liaison”. If standards already exist somewhere else, we want to work with those groups for improvement. If we find true gaps, we decide where best to move forward with new standards.
That is a little bit of background.
We want to “get going” and be productive quickly, so I am working with the group chair to schedule our first meeting (kick off meeting). Please look for the kick off meeting to appear on the upcoming events calendar for the group soon.
If you have a topic you would like discussed at the kick off meeting, please send the topic to me or the group chair so we can place it on the agenda. If you are interested in some sort of leadership position in the group, please let me know about that also.
If you are looking for additional information about the group or have questions, please feel free to contact me via the W3C.
Summary: The W3C are getting more involved with defining standards around ’social business’ – this is a very good thing IMO
We’re entering a fresh year of marketing wars around naming conventions, with various vendors aligned around conceptual ideas that they hope will define and corner the market for them. The noise level is likely to be greater than ever as investments need to be recouped and projected (and possibly hoped for…) market share captured.
While everyone and their brother has now baked an activity stream into their software, there are large, complicated operational activities enabled by our new interconnectedness and associated technologies which are not well defined and which vary enormously in value depending on industry vertical. Interoperability with previous generations of technologies and deeply ingrained ways of working make the task of defining the opportunities for greater efficiency all the more challenging.
Battle lines that have been drawn for some time between vendors are likely to become more defined this year, but more importantly will the average Joe or Jane outside the tech industry have any idea what all the noise is about? As Larry Dignan commented on ZDNet earlier this week there’s “…more chatter about the social enterprise than the tech industry can stand” and in my experience some people are already exasperated and turned off by all the noise over substance. I’ve talked to various people at the W3C over the last couple of weeks on several topics including standards for Social Business/ Social Enterprise/ Enterprise 2.0/Collaborative Networks …or whatever you choose to call formally deployed Web 2.0 and mobile technologies inside companies and more importantly the work patterns that can improve productivity around them.
A heroic precursor and enabler to the Web 2.0 movement was WASP, The Web Standards Project, which was formed by visual coders and designers to help drive consistency across the various flavors of web browsers, which was driving everyone nuts back then. In that era there was some frustration with the W3C not holding the various vendors feet to the fire on consistency around adherence to html and later CSS standards. That type of battle ten years ago could well be repeated in the coming months, this time about technical adherence and use models, and the W3C are thankfully involved at an earlier stage this time.
Most large companies already have many flavors of technologies in house – marketing has Jive, engineers Atlassian, IT Sharepoint etc etc – and getting any kind of interoperability and information between the various username and password protected collaboration silos can be very problematic, particularly when there are fiefdoms involved.
The larger players are now making fresh significant moves to try to capture enterprise scale with use case frameworks. The Dachis Group did ground breaking work on the then new concept of a social business over the last three years, while Jive software renamed their Clearspace products ‘Social Business Software’ in 2009 and of course Salesforce have evangelized their vision of the ‘Social Enterprise’ on the foundation of their force.com platform. IBM have been slowly ramping up their version of Social Business – I attended a free roadshow with prospects this time last year where Rob Koplowitz of analyst firm Forrester presented their current vision. Not much interest from the attendees I spoke to back then, who admittedly were mostly pre existing IBM clients grappling with older generations of their technology.
A lot has happened in the last twelve months however and many people have done great work in maturing both the products and the marketplace: Jive successfully IPO’d and funding has flowed to various software companies in anticipation of a lucrative new market space. I’m one of the people working with end users of these technologies and have the bruises that come with actually rolling up your sleeves on a Monday morning and making better collaboration work within the parameters and contexts of specific company cultures, and can attest to the marketing sizzle deprogramming often necessary before you get to the pragmatic work of driving greater efficiencies – which is what justifies the purchase of these technologies.
The W3C did an ‘idea jam‘ using IBM technology in November of last year, partly to discuss the value of open standards in social business – more on this in another post – and IBM and Google in particular appear to be getting behind greater consistency through the W3C stewardship, which I think is a great thing and good insurance against post irrational exuberance bubble bursts. Saba Software are currently running a Management 2.0 Hackathon led by Gary Hamel I’m involved with which is throwing up some interesting angles, cumulatively these efforts will ideally result in a body of mature thinking that will be of more use than than the endless ‘How to’ social media lightweight handy hints that often do more harm than good. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing….
Aside from all the marketing driven vendors I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Atlassian and Alfresco in the big picture, who are the solid bedrock for those choosing to roll their own environments, vendors such as Socialtext and Traction Team Page who have done so much to get the marketplace to where it is today through their deep thinking and contributions to the evolving online world – and of course the much maligned (and successful) Microsoft Sharepoint and associated cloud developments. Companies free of the baggage incumbents such as IBM have, such as Moxie software or Box.net arguably have advantages in their ability to provide the opportunity for a fresh start to prospects, an idea Jive have historically been very successful with in the past.
With HR Tech, Business Process and all manner of other vendors all jumping into the ’social’ space there has never been a more important time for standards consistency – this will be a very interesting next few months and a lot depends on the longer term triumph of standards over marketing hyperbole.
