by Wim Soens

The past few weeks, it was impossible not to notice the desperate quest for Google Wave invites on Twitter. One blogger even tried to auction-off his invite on eBay, with bids reaching $5,000 before the auction was shut down. Many years in the software business have taught me to carefully consider which waves to ride – or more importantly which ones to ignore. But the buzz about Google Wave made me very curious to say the least. Obviously, I’m especially interested to find out how Google Wave’s real-time communication technology and features apply to Enterprise 2.0 collaboration and innovation.

According to Mashable, Google Wave is a real-time communication platform. It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client. I like this. Integrating communication, networking and process oriented tools in one slick application is the key challenge for any collaborative platform developer. However, I do admit that the real-time aspect worries me a bit, and it’s clearly causing a lot of turbulence in the blogosphere to.
The integration of live aspects into Wave looks very attractive, but at the same time it creates a kind of complexity and inefficiency, also described by bloggers Steve Rubel, Robert Scoble, and Louis Gray. The point is that in this era of ‘attention crash’ professional knowledge workers are seeking exactly the opposite: simplicity and productivity. For the same reason, part of our R&D effort at CogniStreamer is focused on computing technology that reduces and simplifies collaboration processes in order to increase efficiency and performance.

But let’s be positive. Apart from this real-time issue, Google Wave introduces many interesting features. Playback for instance, where you can playback any part of the wave to see what was said – really helpful if you want to join a discussion that’s already halfway. On-the-fly auto-translation is another example. Most of our clients are global companies active in several continents all over the world. Internet got everybody connected, but for these companies, language remains an important natural barrier. In-line translation could be the answer to connect Chinese, Dutch or other native speakers in one collaborative platform.

On the Enterprise 2.0 relevancy scale however, the way Google Wave integrates Robots – automated participants within a wave – is very promising. Robots can modify information in waves, interact with users, communicate with others waves, and pull information from outside sources. But the most interesting aspect is that they behave like another person within a Google Wave conversation, except that they’re automated.

In my previous post I wrote that the use of persuasive technology in CogniStreamer is aimed at forging connections, improving communication, and enabling coordination. To achieve this, we are using agents (or bots) that monitor and analyze the collaborative activity to find persuasion windows, and then gently trigger individual users (our user groups) to connect, discuss or collaborate. One important principle is that the agents’ interaction should be perceived as friendly advice from fellow users. Google Wave sets a perfect example with bots interacting through the same communication and discussion channels used by the human users.

To answer the question, not all features introduced in Google Wave are probably equally relevant for Enterprise 2.0. (Or maybe they are, but some of us are just not ready for them yet.) The future will tell. But I’m convinced this is a big step in the right direction. Getting closer every day…

by Wim Soens

It doesn’t happen very often unfortunately, but driving back last Thursday night from the Design for Persuasion conference in Brussels– the biggest persuasion conference in the world so far - I really felt satisfied, inspired and enriched. I’ll remember this conference because it made me realize that B.J. Fogg’s field of study on persuasive technology is extremely relevant for our research on collaborative innovation here at CogniStreamer®.

In a nutshell, persuasive technology is about using digital media to influence and change people’s behavior, attitudes and emotions. People interested in this topic can check out the book by B.J. Fogg (Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do).  It’s rather funny actually, because this book had been lying around on my desk for weeks until this conference on Persuasive Technology persuaded me to read it. Writing this I realize that in fact, this perfectly illustrates the concept of Persuasion Windows, one of the key insights presented by B.J. Fogg and several other speakers such as Amy Shuen (author of Web 2.0:  A Strategy Guide), Dan Lockton (Brunel University, London) and Richard Sedley (cScape). Persuasion windows are key-moments when people are more open to being persuaded, arising when personal motivation and ability coincide with a trigger or a call to action. Being able to identify, open and use persuasion windows is central to achieve behavioral change. (See BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model to learn more about this.) But even more crucial for an effective persuasion strategy is to think clearly about the target behavior or the type of behavior you seek. Because not all behavior is the same, BJ Fogg developed the Behavior Grid framework to show what types of behavior change might most easily be achieved through certain persuasive strategies and techniques.

Facing the challenge of collaborative innovation and crowd sourcing, companies increasingly make use of web 2.0 technology and tools to carry out and coordinate the fuzzy frontend of the innovation process. However, there are a number of issues in taking web 2.0 tools that have succeeded in an open web environment and applying them to the enterprise, one of them concerning how to motivate, enable and activate enterprise community members. For this reason, the CogniStreamer® Innovation Portal is equipped with process design features based on enablement, interaction and self-organization, in addition to standard conventional process modeling techniques that are biased towards predetermined task sequences and data structures. Persuasive technology is highly relevant in this context, because it focuses on attitude or behavior change resulting from human-computer interaction.

I believe that a collaborative tool should above all be suggestive, offering guidance and warning, more than high-level control and regulation provided to keep things on the straight and narrow. For this reason, the use of persuasive technology aimed at forging connections, improving communication, and enabling coordination among groups of people is such an interesting area of research for us.

Big thanks to the event organizers Christel de Maeyer (Howest, plugMedia) and Dr. BJ Fogg (Stanford University) for putting this together! I’m looking forward to next year’s edition.