Enterprise 2.0 – Dashboards alone won’t bring it home

Irwin Lazar has a new post up on the Enterprise 2.0 Blog labeled “Where are Enterprise 2.0 Dashboards” where he makes some good points about the need for Dashboards in the social enterprise. Having had scoped and planned many sales and marketing portals and intranets for large organizations, my first reaction is one of panic and visions of stale, over produced interfaces that eventually become more a repository and view into mandated inputs, as opposed to business process centric output. Mandating the use of Salesforce.com so management can do effective reporting is one example that’s played out over and over again.

Irwin quickly allays these fears by talking about dynamic inputs and life streams, with the user in control of what he or she sees or who they follow. For instance:

“Unify my view into social networks, allowing me to combine updates from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed and other social networks. I should be able to add RSS feeds, and ideally, this would also serve as the home for my mailbox.”

“Finally, dashboards should incorporate presence from IM services, or perhaps even from enterprise IM systems, perhaps via the ability to set up XMPP presence propagation/importation.”

Irwin is spot on but there’s more that needs to be done to build this perfect communications hub. As I commented on Irwins post, presence and filtering needs to be in early versions of this dashboard. Unlike KM systems and other CMS derivatives, this dynamically fed dashboard will fill up quickly and if you are a believer in “first impressions are lasting impressions”, enterprise users will get overwhelmed and shy away if their dashboards look anything like Friendfeed.

I’ll go further and say that presence needs to be extended beyond presenting a persons online status to include content consumption. RSS doesn’t really scale as nicely, requiring serious effort on the part of IT or technical staff to constantly create narrow topics, not to mention its tech gobbledygook for a mainstream user. If a topic, conversation or a voice is urgent, let me filter for those at the source or from within a dashboard and use a notification platform that can come find me via IM, Email, RSS or my phone when the content surfaces. If it can wait, the dashboard or an email digest is just fine.

Media watching is not a sport for enterprise employees, prospects or customers and the expectation that someone is going to check in into their personalized dashboard regularly is not practical design. Moreover, user driven portal or dashboard customization beyond the first time set up almost never happens and so provide all the content access tools (presence and filtering) upfront before the fire hose emerges.

Update: Michael Krigsman who writes the must-read blog ‘IT Project Failures’ on ZDNet has another take on the pittfals and opportunities for Enterprise Dashboards, here.

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  1. […] Enterprise 2.0 – Dashboards alone won’t bring it home | Pretzel Logic – Enterprise 2.0 http://www.pretzellogic.org/2009/01/enterprise-20-dashboards-alone-wont-bring-it-home – view page – cached Irwin Lazar has a new post up on the Enterprise 2.0 Blog labeled “Where are Enterprise 2.0 Dashboards” where he makes some good points about the need for — From the page […]

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