Enterprise Social Software as an IT Project Platform

There is no doubt that enterprise custom application software is a type of social activities: people with different skills, experiences, work habits, even personalities work together to deliver something that can add values to business stakeholders.

The collaborative nature of IT project is more paramount when team members come from different locations (inshore and offshore), systems, and departments.

What the enterprise social software has tried to solve is exactly that: collaboration, although in a much broader sense. Here is the definition, enterprise social software is, “a system of web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise.” (http://www.aiim.org/What-is-Web-2.0.aspx).

Andrew McAfee listed 6 functionalities of enterprise social software (http://sloanreview.mit.edu/the-magazine/articles/2006/spring/47306/enterprise-the-dawn-of-emergent-collaboration/):

• Search: allowing users to search for other users or content
• Links: grouping similar users or content together
• Authoring: including blogs and wikis
• Tags: allowing users to tag content
• Extensions: recommendations of users; or content based on profile
• Signals: allowing people to subscribe to users or content with RSS feeds

Dion Hinchcliffe added 4 more:

• Freeform function: no barriers to authorship (meaning free from a learning curve or from restrictions)
• Network-oriented function, requiring web-addressable content in all cases
• Social function: stressing transparency (to access), diversity (in content and community members) and openness (to structure)
• Emergence function: requiring the provision of approaches that detect and leverage the collective wisdom of the community

All of these 10 are completely relevant to the entire enterprise software life cycle. I especially value the “no barriers to authorship” feature because it can greatly expedite the knowledge accumulation and sharing. I have always advocated the work stream that is independent of project stream to prepare for things needed for projects. For instance, it will be almost infeasible for business to sponsor a project called Business Vocabulary project. There are no direct benefits seen from their angles. However, Business Vocabulary is a key foundation for any projects. We often find out that all kinds of business vocabularies being embed at the end of long requirement document repeatedly and inconsistently. With the enterprise social software, we can encourage everybody, I mean everybody, especially business people to put their understanding on a definition of a piece of vocabulary there for others to criticize and give feedbacks. In a few years, there will be complete and accurate business vocabulary repository. People who ever contribute to it will see the benefits and take pride of it: team work, right?

Many of software tools must incorporate features of enterprise social software right now or in the near future. Otherwise, they will become irrelevant. For instance, IBM Rational RequisitePro 7.0 enables “anyone with Web access, independent of his or her platform, can view, author and manage requirements quickly and efficiently without having Rational RequisitePro loaded on their machine. Project administration can be done via the web too.”

The desirable scenario is to conduct software project from project management, requirement, architecture, design, code publishing, and quality control entirely on the web using enterprise social software as the platform. The RIA (Rich Internet Application) technologies such as AJAX, Flash and JavaFX will speed it up for sure.

Since everybody can see how Google Docs works, I will use it as an simple example. The word description, UML diagram and tables flow and mesh up naturally in Google docs although primitively, although the diagram drawing part must be enhanced significantly to draw all types of UML diagram. It should also include diagram organizations that only include folders holding diagrams. Nevertheless, it represents the right direction for utilizing enterprise social software. A business analyst can write requirement using word features and draw UML diagrams. He can then publish his document on the web. All stakeholders can see it immediately and more importantly provide feedbacks which can be appended to the document. Or they can modify the document directly. The document comparison feature will allow interested parties to trace the changes people have made all along. The involved parties can also tag the document, which enables more efficient searches.

Enterprise social software is a key enabler of IT project. Let’s use it to unleash the power of the true collaboration.