Along with other edglings, I’m a huge fan of Web 2.0 technologies and especially the frequently borked Twitter. Most folk I know are addicted to Twitter so that despite its many failings, we keep hanging on in the hope that one day, the management will hire a team of engineers that actually knows what it’s doing. That won’t wash in enterprisey land where buyers expect services to be at least fit for purpose and not suffering continuous outages and glitches. This morning for instance, the only way you can reliably see @ replies is to use Summize and enter @username as a search term.

Anyhoo - some enterprising people are thinking of building an enterprise class Twitter clone - well not a clone exactly, an enhanced version that works for enterprise. What makes this project interesting is that it arose almost spontaneously as a result of this Plurk conversation that spilled into Twitter. I found out about it because a person I was searching upon in Twitter mentioned it.

It turns out that a number of the players are people I know through my involvement with SAP’s community network as an un-remunerated mentor. (Disclosure: I do some paid work for SAP’s business process expert community.)  One of them requested I join the project as they needed some business use case scenarios as a guide to the kind of functional requirements the design team will need. I’m no nerd (though I can code a bit of PHP and a fair bit of CSS) but I do understand how business processes work so I signed up for what is now known as ESME.

Serendipitously, around the same time, I was scheduled to talk with Aaron Williams who manages some of the advanced technologies being worked upon at SAP Labs in Palo Alto. We were due to discuss Collaboration Workspaces, a Jive Clearspace based platform that I have used in the past and which is being enhanced by Williams’ team for internal use.

As part of the discussion,Williams mentioned the magic ‘w’ word - widgets, saying that CW will include an Adobe Connect widget at some stage in the next couple of months or so. That’s cool in its own right because it means CS members can schedule and hodl conference calls with all the shared desktop features that Connect offers. I casually mentioned that a team is in the design phase for ESME and asked whether Williams is up for ideas like that which can be incorporated into his initiative. ‘Why yes, even if they’re really crazy ideas,’ came back the reply. W00t! How often can you say that about a behomoth like SAP?

Why should this matter? CW and ESME are firmly in the Web 2.0 camp, offering facilities that enable collaboration and which can be used as part of informal networks designed to solve specific problems.  But; context without process is a waste of time. When problem solving, you still need to be able to have those contextual thoughts expressed through business process - in other words you need to be able to act upon the outcomes. The way I’m looking at this is as an environment that allows business people, business process experts, who may also be technical analysts and developers to come together in a way that collapses time to value for customers. Adding in ESME allowscommunication to takeon an extra dimension that might prove useful in cases where near immediate answers and actions are required. An example might be clarification around policy documents.

ESME is a fascinating idea which is currently considered a ‘thought experiment.’ Its fascination comes from the fact I’ve heard plenty of talk about such projects among Microsoft, IBM, SAP and Oracle (MISO)_ people, but not seen anything get under way. ESME will be entered for consideration as a potential short listed solution for TechEd DemoJam. If successful, it will be interesting to discover how just how far such a service can go and whether it will be possible to get a widget into CW. That only leaves the BPX’ers to get enthusiastic about the project to amplify use cases so they are more ‘real’ than the ones we have at the moment. It will be an interesting ride.