Jim McGee asks:
Traction? How about Radio? . What more do you get than buying individual licenses for Radio which you can get for about 1/10 the cost of Traction? [ McGee's Musings]

Jim is referring to the review (quoted below) of Traction Server by Jon Udell in InfoWorld, and since I'm trying to get a little traction of my own -- developing a strategy for small to mid-size business information/KM infrastructure -- I decided to investigate it from a business perspective.

Here are the areas I thought important to consider in comparing Traction to Radio:

  • Security
  • Support
  • Deployment
  • Structure
  • Access points (I/O interfaces)
  • Training
  • Adoption
Everything here came from reading the Infoworld article and browsing the Traction website and related links. Your mileage may vary.

The Good Stuff

Traction does look like an interesting product. For a limited time you get the 15-user license for $2,499 (roughly 50% off the regular price), bringing the per seat cost under $175 (about 4x the cost of a Radio client) and putting it within reach of the small to medium enterprise.
Traction - Klogging for the enterprise . -THERE IS STILL NO sure-fire recipe for KM (knowledge management) success, but the ingredients must include the staples of the knowledge worker: e-mail, the Web, and Microsoft Office. With Traction Software's KM solution, content flowing through all these channels is easily captured by the Java-based Traction Server, which can be best described as an enterprise Weblog system. Documents posted to the server are stored as XML, tagged (in a Web interface) with system- and user-defined terms, made available for full-text and structured search, and served back out as team workspaces, enterprise information portals, or both.[InfoWorld via Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

For the money you get a (mostly) self-contained, multi-platform system with some very useful features -- 2-way e-mail interface with Project (aka Radio Category) designation, Java crypto and security, pre-configured display rules and definitions, semi-automated metadata, search engine, and a variety of pre-configured publishing templates. You also get the backing of In-Q-Tel Inc.-- the non-profit private venture group funded by the CIA, the Slater Center for Interactive Technologies, and private investors -- which funds Traction Software. Now where else can you buy CIA software for $175/seat?

Traction does seem to have the right conceptual model -- the enterprise Weblog system-- in mind, and claims their development is based on collaborative web principles:

Traction draws heavily on successful techniques and vision from the work of Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, Andy van Dam , and Vannevar Bush. The Traction Journal was directly inspired by Doug Engelbart's 1992 paper Toward High-Performance Organizations: A Strategic Role for Groupware and Vannevar Bush's Memex concept from As We May Think. [Traction Software]

Security and support are likely to be better with Traction. I don't know enough about Radio to know what it's security model is, but my guess is security hasn't been a focus of the UserLand group -- certainly not like it is for the CIA. For $200/seat I suspect you also get more predictable support and considerably more documentation than available through the altruistic plans used by UserLand. Both these features are likely to be very important in any KM infrastructure decision. Traction looks like it uses centralized deployment -- a model well suited to current business and IT culture -- and one likely to be less reliant on individual PC configurations than Radio. I can see how this could lower overall support costs for a company-wide k-log system.

The e-mail interface is something Radio badly needs. The more ways you can get data into, and out of, a KM system the more likely everyone is to use it. The ability to easily e-mail log summaries, as well as accept and route incoming e-mail posts, is a very nice feature. RSS enablement seems quick and clean, providing yet one more method for users to interact with Traction. The software also seems to have a very strong, ready-to-run structure. The combination of pre-set templates, rules, definitions, and labels mean the system can begin automagically slurping in every available document, e-mail, and linked URL. As Jon Udell says:

The company has deep roots in hypertext, and its engine weaves a dense fabric. Every action is recorded and cross-referenced. Every document's inbound and outbound links can be displayed. Items can be collected and reclassified in batches. The interface is highly skinnable in ways that affect not just appearance, but the level of exposed detail.

It all seems quite robust, practical, efficient, and business-like. And therein lies the problem.

So much for the good stuff.

To understand how a complex software product is designed to be used you need to look at the audience for which it was designed. Traction Software says the following:

[...] Business teams typically have two kinds of users, each with their own particular needs:
  • Author/Creator/Information Manager
  • Reader/Information Consumer/Decision Maker [...]

This bifurcated audience view violates one of my key principles -- everyone contributes. There can be no artificial distinction between creators and consumers in an effective KM system. Such a divide, by it's mere existence, creates a sort of elitist mindset -- a proletariat of contributors serving the company goals -- that will lower the chance for long-term adoption and use.

With a Radio-based system there is no such distinction. In Radio everyone publishes, everyone contributes. The act of consuming comes as a part of the act of publishing. By giving individuals the satisfaction of publishing their own material, in their own way Radio provides an intrinsic reward for the contributor and obviates the consumer class of user.

There is one other broad philosophical issue: Traction seems built for a top-down, hierarchal, controlled access system -- precisely what you would expect from a CIA software project. Radio is much more a bottom-up package -- a grass roots, revolutionary, damn-the-IT department sort of thing that people can get excited about, have fun with, proselytize. Can you imagine anyone but a CIO or IT-geek proselytizing the densely woven fabric of Traction?

Radio combined with Manila or a Conversant groupware site provides a backbone for individual publishing plus a framework for collaboration. Traction seems to provide a robust framework for collaboration, but the lack of an individual presence makes me question just how enthusiastic people will be about its use. And without enthusiasm there will not be much use. The failure to get people enthused over a KM tool (or CRM or ERP or any other enterprise-wide IT initiative) is the number one barrier to adoption. I have sat in on numerous autopsy meetings for failed projects and one of the leading causes of failure is not ensuring users are involved, excited, and satisfied.

The templates, rules, and appearance of Traction are very customizable, but my guess is that all this ability lies wth the administrator. If you are a consumer or mere creator I suspect you have little control over the appearance of your pages. I also wonder just how effectively Traction can be used to promote individual weblogs. All the data in Traction is XML so you can do with it what you will, and transforms out to personal weblogs could be easily written by an administrator. Likewise, I suspect an administrator could easily write input filters to take Radio RSS feeds. But the key is an administrator.

Running a Radio/Manila or Radio/Conversant site also require an administrator, but individual users call on the admin only when needed. They are largely responsible for their own site and the administrator never becomes a barrier to contribution. It is not obvoius this is the case with Traction.

Summary

I've said it before: I like Radio a lot as a framework for KM, but there are some things that could be improved. Traction seems to improve on several of these. But Radio is still a lot closer to reaching the mythical Zero Contribution Barrier that I believe is critical to any long-term KM success.

Given that you can purchase 4-8 Radio clients for the cost of a single seat for Traction, I have to say it's a clear winner unless you work for the CIA or other information intensive enterprise with highly disciplined information professionals. Even if money isn't an obstacle, if you work in the normal business world, with the regular people I see day-in and day-out at computer terminals across America, you're likely to have better long-term adoption with Radio.