As I read this article, I realized that many of the use cases that micro-blogging tools are meant to solve are actually problems that have been around a long time – for example, the need for employees in distributed companies to be able to collaborate and discover individuals (those old “weak ties”) who can solve their problems. The high level of employee involvement at DEC regarding VAXNotes (irregardless of job title, location, etc.) shows that the assumption that active enterprise collaboration is just restricted to the generation who have grown up with Web 2.0 technology is wrong. VAXNotes emerged in an environment that was pre-Web 2.0 – indeed it was pre-Web 1.0.  Thus, the assumption that it is just Generation Y employees who will be the primary users of such micro-blogging tools is misleading. If the corporate culture (as evidenced by the DEC article) supports such tools, users from all generations will use them.  

Thus, microblogging tool vendors should examine in more detail knowledge management research and the associated case studies to get a better feeling for these requirements. Although we always assume that such vendors are on the cutting edge of the technology, the problems that they hope to solve have been around for a long time.   Obviously if the problems addressed by these tools have been around a long time, then there are obviously tools / technology that meet the associated needs. True. True. The question is what do the new generation of microblogging tools bring to the table – 1) ease of use, 2) the ability for users to decide for themselves what information they wish to see and 3) integration in a variety of environments within and beyond the corporate firewall.  However, microblogging tool vendors must realize that the technology itself  and the metaphor that it represents can be easily copied (as seen in the plethora of Twitter-clones and microblogging platforms). It is the social network and the information that this network provides that is the key.  Thus,  providing a microblogging tool itself won’t be enough to guarantee success – the services that surround its ramp-up and dispersion in an enterprise will be critical as well.

Since most of those involved have/had some relationship to enterprise IT (either from large enterprises themselves, partners providing services for the enterprise or vendors providing software to such customers), there was a real awareness of the requirements of this environment.  

Michael Cote described this characteristic in a quote in an article about ESME in Baseline magazine.

“ESME is interesting because of the background of the people building it,” says Red Monk analyst Michael Cote. “Primarily, there are a lot of enterprise software — specifically, ERP — people involved in the project.”

We not only wanted to create a tool that was primarily focused on the enterprise, we also wanted to use the methodologies with which we were familiar.   To achieve this goal, we created use cases that were the basis for the initial UI designs.  These use cases would be familiar to any analyst who was / is involved in enterprise software.

Usually, this information never makes it to the surface and is buried somewhere in a project archive. ESME is a new sort of open-source project that involves the whole spectrum of roles typical in an enterprise software project but in a community setting. We’ve decided to make a few of these use cases available so that the public can gain better insights into how such projects emerge.

The selected use cases are available for download here.

Please note that some of the use cases included describe functionality that are not currently available. Indeed, the described functionality may surface at a later date in an entirely different form.