Beta 1.0.1 released

We'll be moving to using build numbers rather than version numbers shortly. However, here are the notes for today's release: 

- Widgets are now correctly brought to the foreground when you click anywhere on or within the widget (only works in IE). On other browsers the user still has to select the widget title area to bring the widget to the foreground.

- New feature on the widget side menu tab which allows a user to view related widgets that are not currently in use on the page.

- Where a sub-tab function is dependent on a certain widget being present, that widget can no longer be removed by the user e.g. when editing a Form, the Form Editor can no longer be removed from a sub tab but all other widgets can still be removed. Otherwise, widget adding and removing is unchanged.

- Widgets now have a maximise option which maximises the widget as to the size of the viewable workspace. Minimising the widget will return the widget to its original size and position. (In IE the widget sidebar menu tab does not show when the widget is maximised).

- Fixed a bug that caused the sidebar content to not expand to the screen height in Chrome.

- Changed the Flow Charts to make them more efficient.

- Changed the sidebar content to get its content on demand rather than when the platform is first loaded

Beta 1 available

Today the first beta version was released at http://www.flowtools.co.uk.

Significant changes have been made to improve stability, hence we feel it meets our quality criteria for beta release. We expect to be in beta for some time now whilst we work on giving you what you need to exploit the service delivery capabilities of the platform in the simplest way possible.

The more visible changes made this time are:

• Sidebar updated to reflect the grouping of widgets into applications.
• New users to the platform will get some helpful introductory pages to get them started.
• All options in the top bar have been shifted into a drop down (we'll need the space later).

You'll notice that we've not sorted the SSL cert out yet. That's because we're considering a rebrand and a new URL. More on that soon.

Alpha 4 available

As noted on the main http://www.flowtools.co.uk site, we released Alpha 4 at the start of this week. Registration is still on a invite only basis; there's an enquiries button on the login/registration page if you want to get on board and try it out.

Regular users will notice that the livery bar has a new, lower profile, cool all-black look; we think it really separates out the static livery bar from the dynamic, data driven, user controlled workspace area.

All existing communities are now locked down; users are welcome to join the Turkey Farm Plc community if they wish to see the demo graphs and so on in action. All users become part of the Flow community by default so you're in the same boat as a lot of like minded individuals.

Widget drag and drop should function much better as we've overhauled that too.

We're hoping to release Beta 1 soon; probably around the 8th November.

Flow is Meaningful

“When facts are commoditised, understanding follows...In the miscellaneous world the task is to build meaning.”                                                       
                                                               David Weinberger, Chapter 10, Everything Is Miscellaneous

When defining Flow as ‘meaningful’, a number of words suggested themselves as alternatives; understandable, conversationalist, valuable, connective, coherent, cohesive, salient, relevant, informative.... 

Flow is all of these things, but the quote above sums it up best of all; Flow allows understanding to be derived from data.

Simply categorising data is useful for finding what you want, so allowing users to choose, say, the categories under which a piece of data should be logged has some use is a basic, one dimensional form of metadata; your users are augmenting the raw data with more information that allows the company to make use of it.

Flow goes beyond this, allowing users to highlight and tag data at will, in any combination they like. This meaningfully enhances data by generating metadata and is transforming. It allows the data to be found, shared, and placed into context for others. And the best metadata generator any organisation has is its people, because they have the expertise.

Knowledge Management was very popular in the late ‘90s but it failed as a concept in its execution; there was no way to get all the tacit information out of people’s heads. Perhaps the Knowledge Management vendors of the time expected resident experts to write a book? What happened in practice is that forums and wikis found their way onto some corporate intranets but that was about it; no solution has the immediacy of Flow, where conversations and metadata are tied to particular source data points.

So if an expert looks at a manufacturing process and sees a correlation between two trend lines, then they should be able to tag that, adding their expertise and insight for others to draw on. Everything of interest that happens could be tagged, building up a huge repository of information that was previously held in expert’s heads.

Facts are commodities; and streams of facts, of data, are being produced by organisations at a huge rate - too fast to handle. By aggregating this data into something meaningful, then providing a platform which allows users to add their knowledge to the raw data, the data can begin to be understood and the understanding shared.

Flow offers a platform that helps organisations realise the value of their hidden knowledge. It provides a platform for extending this capability worldwide; expertise shared on a global scale.

Flow is Social

Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) describes an alternative view of an organisation in “What Would Google Do?”; he proposes that it is drawn as a network diagram rather than a hierarchical chart. This would include all the suppliers, customers, members of the public and so on that interact with it, working out why each relationship existed; goods, services, revenue, knowledge.  It would show that the exponential growth in influence of an organisation lies not with looking inwards, rather growth would be maximised by identifying new network nodes and working with them. Light up lots more nodes, get lots more influence.

That’s why the network is crucial. You could think of Flow as taking social networking principles and applying it to actually doing work. You could say “it’s like Facebook, but you’re actually doing work” and not be too far off; Flow exploits the exponential value of networks (as described by Metcalfe’s Law).

Inter-organisation networks therefore add huge value and Flow can allow an organisation to take advantage of the network effect without a huge implementation or culture change effort; Flow will just take advantage of the communities that already exist unrecognised, as users define working groups.

Flow will bring what Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg called ‘elegant organisation’ to the way organisations do things already; in terms of an application platform, it’s de-obstructing the process of working with partners – it’s facilitating, then ‘getting out of the way’ as discussed here.

Each organisation is already part of numerous external communities. Flow is unique because it can bring those communities together in one place. Instead of building a bespoke database, engaging a third party to host it and then working out how to update it, we believe it should be a simple case of designing a process and – click – sharing it with those users who share a community.

The key is to give the power to the users by making it easy to form useful cross-functional groups. It doesn’t matter whether they’re tiny or big, with a couple of users or a thousand; in fact, in terms of contributing to the community conversation the smaller might well be more productive. Communities are free; create one when you need it. Projects are great examples of short term communities.

There are many places that communities may add value; a supply chain can truly be a chain of partners working together; peer organisations can work together on common problems; suppliers can service or easily gather information from all their customers through a single point. 

Communities are at the heart of Flow and conversations are at the heart of your business - and sharing a widget, or a process, is the start of a conversation. Your organisation is made up of users that already share, discuss and collaborate and Flow will capitalise on that by making conversations easy, then capturing them in a central place where they knowledge they contain can add value to the organisation.

Your organisation is full of conversations right now, none of which is being captured. Those conversations may be about the canteen, the weather, a crucial line of business problem, football, late running projects and so on...Flow makes it easy to discuss elements of your business and every time this happens, someone in your organisation is adding value to that data; they’re turning it into knowledge.

Flow is Personal

“Get out of the way”                   
                                         Craig Newmark, craigslist.com

Flow’s underlying philosophy is permissive; business knows what it has to do and the role of IT systems is to make it as easy as possible – to remove the obstructions.

This particularly applies to the user interface for Flow. The user experience should be dictated by role, data and the processes that make up day to day work, not by the interaction with the system.

So, the UI needs to get out of the way; it needs to be conducive to performance not obstructive of it. What this translates to in practice is an interface that is;

• Clear; no hidden functions
• Configurable; users can configure it to work for them.

The user interface is a key component of the platform and adopts it’s principles; it can be easily extended to meet the business needs. After all, your business is made up of people, it needs to be personal; sensitive to each indidividual’s individual published and not so published roles and tasks; not only suitable for large corporates but also extensible to their not so large freelancers and SME partners.

We see Flow as the way that everyone gets everything they need to do their work. That might mean everything required is within the platform, or might mean linking to other platforms.

Flow is everything a magazine style intranet isn’t; personal doesn’t equate to a top down broadcast mentality. Rather each user has their own voice; Flow allows users to engage with each other about things on the shop floor. It’s going to be a key innovation tool, linking together people and data in new ways.

Flow is Viral

Information is usually distributed by email, print, discussion or intranet.

Our position is that none of these is ideal.

Email is a conversational tool that hides the conversation, probably losing it forever; you’re probably reliant on a search through proprietary format archive file that’s might well be based on your own hard drive. Not ideal.

Email is also insecure. It’s very easy to email data to third parties. Indeed, email is perhaps more insecure than print for this reason, though printed copies are more likely to be left lying around, or printed out and posted on a notice board.

Both email and print encourage discussion. These conversations are where expertise is exchanged and data is made sense of; this is where knowledge is created.

As soon as the conversation is lost to a wider audience, its usefulness is diminished. The final exchange of that conversation, where a decision is made, or an understanding is reached, is lost and with it, the knowledge gained and value added. When those involved leave the company, that knowledge goes with them. Their emails for example are unlikely to be trawled for information – even if they were, they’d have no context.

Many intranets don't have a conversational element at present; it’s broadcast news for consumption only, or at best they include forums and wikis. The broadcast isn't efficient - not only does it cost but top down communications can turn people off. A recommendation from a colleague however is more likely to get looked at and acted upon, and has the big advantage of being free.

So with Flow we wanted to make it so easy to start a conversation about a particular bit of data or event that users didn’t bother to email; they can share it with a community of interested parties with one click – whether they’re in or outside the organisation.

This is viral; in fact, with the communities model, it’s viral plus; 

• Relevance
• Users will share things that they know their community may be interested in. Other users can choose to deal with that person based on their credibility or any other value system they choose.
• If the data itself is annotated, or a shared with an explanatory message, users can assess its importance and view it in context. 

• Security
• Where a community is protected or private, users are approved. Widgets are similarly controlled.
  
• Source data
• No need to export, print or otherwise manipulate data; users can tag and link directly to the source.

Viral is not sequential. It’s exponential. So the right information finds its way to the right people without needing to be addressed properly.  Viral is quick.