1. Use of Weblogs for Competitive Intelligence Greg Lloyd – President & Co-Founder Traction Software Providence, Rhode Island USA grl@tractionsoftware.com

2. 2 Outline The World Wide Web is becoming a globally writable as well as readable medium - with weblogs, wikis, RSS syndication This fulfills a vision of hypertext that has evolved over fifty years Competitive Intelligence is an ideal weblog application, at the leading edge of a revolution in working communication for business

3. 3 A blog is a web page typically made up of short, frequently updated "posts" or items that are arranged chronologically like a what's new page or diary. They often include news feeds supplied using a related standard-based technology called RSS (RDF Site Summary or Rich Site Summary.) Now, like instant messaging (IM), which has also begun its migration from the consumer market into the enterprise, the simple and inexpensive software used to create weblogs is finding its way into the workplace. … "The brilliance of blogging is that it creates a system of URLs and archiving that is persistent - it doesn't go away," says Mr. Lawlor. "What is more, weblog software does it all for you.” Business logs on to blogging By Paul Taylor Financial Times, March 2004

4. 4 Technorati Weblogs Aug 05

5. 5 Memex - As We May Think Vannevar Bush July 1945 Atlantic Monthly A vision of a desktop device containing a microfilm research library and repository for trails of references and notes. Captures the “momentarily important item” in a form that “will not fade”. “The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record.”

6. 6 Early Hypertext Systems Hypertext Editing System Brown University van Dam, Nelson et al 1968 NLS / Augment Stanford Research Institute Engelbart et al 1968 Xanadu Nelson et al

7. 7 Engelbart added a timeline

8. 8 Bring order into the time stream of Augmented Knowledge workers

9. The World Wide Web WWW CERN Berners-Lee et al 1990 Two elements: HTTP transport protocol HTML Markup language

10. 10 WWW is simple and scalable

11. 11 But easily broken

12. 12 1968 NLS (oN Line System). A Hypertext Journal for high performance teams 1992 Towards High Performance Organizations: A Strategic Role for Groupware Douglas Engelbart 1992

13. 13 Dialog, External Intelligence, Knowledge Product

14. 14 Journal + Web = Traction Stable content Paragraph addressable Built-in time order Flexible viewspecs for assembly of content Web browser interface Web linkable Easily authored Each server creates a cluster of weblogs

15. 15 Weblogs create authored trails for general web content

16. 16 Weblogs in protected domains support private as well as public use

17. 17 Classic WeblogEnterprise Weblog One per personOne per group My opinions about everythingWorking communication Everything visiblePermissioned spaces Standalone weblogMany spaces, scalable Outside firewallInside / across firewall Talk to the world!Talk to stakeholders One authorMany authors

18. 18 Enterprise Weblog Designed for “Groups with a Goal” Backbone for Enterprise Working Communication –Group weblogs with many voices and one purpose –Create Private as well as public spaces –Provide authenticated, encrypted access based on global identity and local permission A hypertext work space –Make private comments on public content –Share files as well as articles (WebDAV) –Provides secure RSS and Search engine skins Organized by Importance, Group and Topic –Weblog spaces have permissions –Individuals see union of activity, based on permissions Organized by Time –A way to come up to speed, quickly –Context for every interaction –You can correlate many timelines

19. 19 Competitive Intelligence Cycle Obtain CI request Collect Necessary Information Analyze and Synthesize Information Communicate Intelligence The CI Cycle is an ideal match for Engelbart’s Model

20. 20 Pharmaceutical CI Dark Blogs: The Use of Blogs in Business - Case Study 01 A European Pharmaceutical Group Dark Blogs: The Use of Blogs in Business - Case Study 01 A European Pharmaceutical Group by Suw Charman, Corante Research, June 13, 2005 “The blog format lends itself particularly well to the type of material that we're producing,” said the CIO. “Competitive information is always very unstructured and comes in lots of different ways — through the internet, internal sources, and various other ways. Using blogs to organise the data is quite effective because it doesn't impose too rigid a structure where we need some inherent flexibility.” – quoted in Charman 2005

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24. 24 RSS Feed

25. 25 European Pharma Study Six CI Weblogs –General CI News for entire company. All may read or comment, CI staff posts –Four Therapeutic Area CI blogs For experts, management, CI staff –CI Editorial Board blog Private discussion and analysis

26. 26 European Pharma Summary Very good response due to “Best Practices” Automatically generated email digest was popular and effective: –Provides a company wide alerting service with one email per day –Links to CI weblog encourage reading and commenting on new material –RSS / Atom provide similar notification, but email “forms a bridge between old and new technologies”

27. 27 Best Practice Summary The blog's aims were clear and precise and had been defined after comprehensive examination of the problems The project had the full support of the CEO and the Executive Committee There was a well constructed project plan, which included consideration of high level issues such as structure, taxonomy and search requirements as well as day to day user requirements A clear, semi-open editorial process was defined The open commenting system allows for dialogue with users with existing systems and technologies created a more seamless user experience Read permission control means that potentially sensitive information can only be accessed only by those who need it A slow roll out to a focused user group ensured word of mouth evangelisation and gradual build up to hard launch Training has been kept simple and minimal, reducing barrier to entry for new users Integration with email allows users to access content that's important to them via a familiar application

28. 28 US Pharma Group Seven CI Weblogs –General CI News All can read or comment, Moderated post –Five Therapeutic Areas For experts, management, CI Staff –Executive CI blog For executive management, CI Staff

29. 29 US Pharma Group Summary A quick, functional replacement for monthly CI reports circulated by email For readers the weblog provides: –Frequent updates without overload –Quick response to questions or comments –Contextualized information (explicit links) For CI analysts the weblog simplified gathering and analysis as well as distribution

30. 30 A Virtuous Pattern Weblog technology is appropriate when deployment leads to: Less work for primary content contributors A more timely and easily assimilated work product Directed to an interested audience of stakeholders, including management With a range of private to public spaces for commentary and discussion Creating of a contemporaneous log of significant discoveries, events, decisions and results, for “bottom up knowledge management” as well as tracking of exceptions and working communication

31. 31 Before …After …

32. 32 Conclusion Weblogs handle working communication more effectively and securely than email The weblog + RSS model works exceptionally well for situational awareness, including timeline correlation from many sources The weblog + RSS model scales like the web to handle the largest enterprises Capturing the “momentarily important item” in a form that “will not fade”

33. 33 Roots References NLS TELECONFERENCING FEATURES: The Journal, and Shared- Screen Telephoning, Douglas C. Engelbart, Compcon 75 Digest, Sep 1975 pp 173-178 (AUGMENT,33076)NLS TELECONFERENCING FEATURES: The Journal, and Shared- Screen Telephoning Toward High-Performance Organizations: A Strategic Role for Groupware, Douglas C. Engelbart, Bootstrap Institute, June 1992 (AUGMENT,132811)Toward High-Performance Organizations: A Strategic Role for Groupware Lost In The Archive: Vision, Artefact And Loss In The Evolution Of Hypertext, Belinda Barnet PhD Thesis, University of New South Wales, 2005Lost In The Archive: Vision, Artefact And Loss In The Evolution Of Hypertext Re-Place-ing Space: The Roles of Place and Space in Collaborative systems, Steve Harrison and Paul Dourish, Proceedings of CSCW '96Re-Place-ing Space: The Roles of Place and Space in Collaborative systems Information Foraging, Peter Pirolli and Stuart K. Card, Psychological Review, 1999Information Foraging Social Software and the Politics of Groups, Clay Shirky, www.shirky.com, 3 March 2003Social Software and the Politics of Groups www.shirky.com

34. 34 Contact Greg Lloyd President and Co-Founder grl@tractionsoftware.com (401)-528-1145 Traction Software, Inc. 245 Waterman Street Suite 309 Providence, RI 02906 USA www.TractionSoftware.com

35. 35 A different “Skin” can simultaneously give the same information to different readers in a totally different way

36. 36 Bill Gates on Weblogs Microsoft CEO Summit May 20, 2004 This (weblogs and RSS) is a very interesting thing, because whenever you want to send e-mail you always have to sit there and think who do I copy on this. There might be people who might be interested in it or might feel like if it gets forwarded to them they'll wonder why I didn't put their name on it. But, then again, I don't want to interrupt them or make them think this is some deeply profound thing that I'm saying, but they might want to know. And so, you have a tough time deciding how broadly to send it out. Then again, if you just put information on a Web site, then people don't know to come visit that Web site, and it's very painful to keep visiting somebody's Web site and it never changes. It's very typical that a lot of the Web sites you go to that are personal in nature just eventually go completely stale and you waste time looking at it. And so, what blogging and these notifications are about is that you make it very easy to write something that you can think of, like an e-mail, but it goes up onto a Web site. And then people who care about that get a little notification. And so, for example, if you care about dozens of people whenever they write about a certain topic, you can have that notification come into your Inbox and it will be in a different folder and so only when you're interested in browsing about that topic do you go in and follow those, and it doesn't interfere with your normal Inbox.

37. 37 Pharma Product Development Journal Research and Development Intelligence and Strategy Marketing and Sales Record progress from a researcher with an idea to a 1000+ person program team Document ideas, meetings, actions, decisions, specifications Define and track issues Bring new team members up to speed when stage-gates are passed Support the knotty communication process –Decrease mistakes –Increase time to market Full audit trail –Versions and label changes

38. 38 I don’t know what Silicon Valley will do when it runs out of Doug’s Ideas - Alan Kay

39. 39 Solutions supporting high interactivity and high value, reusable content Journal metaphor for publishing Knowledge is expanded incrementally through use (think “Wikipedia”) Primary use is enabling groups of individuals to work more effectively over time email Web Pages RSS Feeds Cell Phone MS Office Email RSS Feed Web Portal Phone/PDA Enterprise Search Introducing the Enterprise Weblog

40. Traction TeamPage Demonstration

41. 41 Traction Spaces: What’s Different? Each space can be open to a group or kept private - handles internal, stakeholder or public audience Each post or comment is addressed to a selected audience Each post in a space can be from a different author - each space specifies who has what rights (read, write, comment, edit, erase) The original author of a post can have special rights Traction maintains a full edit and action history for review Each space becomes its own place, with its own norms and permissions Your single sign on identity and permissions give you a 20,000 foot view across all spaces you are interested in and permitted to see, in context. Traction calls each space with its own membership, rules, labels and presentation options a Project