Inside, Outside

At the recent Jive meeting, we had two clearly delineated groups there -- people who were focused on outside communities, and  people who were focused on insider communities.

IF you just sat and listened to how the two groups were using the product, what they wanted, etc. you might come away with the impression that there were two distinct use cases with not much commonality.

But, as the meeting progressed, I think these two groups will have more in common over time.

Outside In

The outside community builders have very slick user interfaces, have done all sort of customization, and have active user population that have lots and lots of zeros associated with them.  Their sites are a key component of the product or service being offered.

They are designed, funded and managed very well.  You can go see their handiwork easily.

And they have a requirements shopping list that includes scalability, content filtering, and so on.

But a few of them have noticed that the rest of the company isn't engaging with what they're doing.  Yes, they've got large, passionate external communities, but they're almost an adjunct to the company.

Internal groups within the company (other than those assigned to support the web site) aren't engaged among themselves.  And they're certainly not engaging with their external community on a regular basis.

And I think a few of these people recognize that this situation isn't ideal.

Inside Out

I presented a different view of how we thought about the relationship between inside and outside -- we were going to work for a while at becoming proficient at social media skills behind the firewall, so that when we did venture outside in a big way, we'd have thousands of people who were very comfortable and proficient at blogging, discussing, contributing, etc.

If we waited awhile to build proficiency, our external communities had the potential to be vibrant, engaging and conversational places that weren't an external bump on the corporate landscape, and -- better yet -- they'd be directly connected to the internal population of our company.

We'd have conversations that didn't end at a firewall.  External community perspective would directly influence internal thinking.  And internal thinking would directly influence external community perspective.

What This Means

If you have this same end-game in your mind that I have in mine, there are some significant technology implications to consider.

First, let's establish the landscape.  Imagine a small number of internal communities, and a much larger population of external communities around different interest.  (Remember, EMC has a very broad portfolio of technologies, solutions, customers, partners, use cases, etc. so it's impractical to think in terms of one, big honkin' uber-community.

We'll take content and document management very seriously in this world.  We'll need very granular control of what kinds of documents can be seen (or edited) by different communities.  Another reason why we're working with the Jive people to do a Clearspace / Documentum integration -- without this sort of ECM backbone, we'll have content headaches each and every day.

We'll need to give more thought to identity management.  We'll have EMCers who'll participate in many communities, as well as customers and partners who'll do the same.  And no one is going to tolerate another half-dozen username/password combinations  in their lives.

Finally, we're going to have to give real thought to multi-community browsing -- the ability to keep tabs on lots of places and lots of discussions at the same time.  RSS is part of the answer here, to be sure, but I think we're going to need more.

The Bottom Line

So, the folks at Jive perhaps should think in terms of divergence between these two groups, but ulimate convergence.  Sure, the external social software marketplace is evolving in one direction, and the internal enterprise social software marketplace is evolving in another.

But it won't be too long before companies like EMC want to connect the two in very useful ways.

Comments

[Jed Cawthorne]

Chuck

As my current organisation is a Documentum user looking to redevelop its Intranet, I dont suppose you have a timeframe on that Clearspace - Content Server integration do you ?

[Chuck Hollis]

I'm reluctant to provide actual dates -- the Jive people need to do that -- but I'm planning to be busy this fall, if all goes well.

[Jevon]

I have written some thoughts on this, mainly suggesting that there should be a separation between the two efforts (internal and external) but that you need to create continuity between them in order to get the sort of "network effects" results that really take things to a new level.

http://socialwrite.com/2007/01/02/from-inside-to-outside-what-does-the-new-customer-see/

[Greg Unrein]

Jed, I'm a product manager at Jive... we don't have specific dates yet, but I would love to find out more about your needs for the Clearspace - Content Server integration. You can reach me directly via email or xmpp at "greg at jivesoftware.com".