April 22nd, 2008
Enterprise 2.0 industry matures as businesses grapple with its potential
Some of the big IT news over the weekend was the announcement that Forrester predicts that the Enterprise 2.0 space will be a $4.6 billion industry within 5 years. ZDNet’s Larry Dignan had the full breakdown yesterday on Forresters bullish outlook while Dennis Howlett immediately took umbrage with Forrester’s conception of the Enterprise 2.0 marketplace using a “loose definition and one that could be applied to any number of technology components from CRM through to supply chain management and pretty much anything between.”
Certainly that’s the challenge of pinning down something with a term that still doesn’t have industry consensus after two years, yet seems destined to be a vitally important space that our businesses are going to be moving to over the next few years. Enterprise 2.0 itself was originally defined by Harvard’s Andrew McAfee a couple of years ago in careful detail (early timeline) about something he called freeform, social, emergent software applications (such as blogs, wikis, but many others as well.) The enterprise software industry began carrying the banner ever since, applying Enterprise 2.0 to the next generation of countless marketplace offerings, often whether or not they were any of the things that seemed to make this new type of application unique and special.
Read The State of Enterprise 2.0, a thorough summary of this new software space.
The intent of creating this new term, however, was to capture a very significant change in the way that people use networked software, regardless of it was the genuine retooling of “big box” traditional IT software suites or the infiltration of subversive Web 2.0-style consumer applications across the firewall. Careful market segmentation for research tracking purposes and the debate over the inclusion of traditional, top-down IT systems into the definition of Enterprise 2.0 can be interesting exercises. But such efforts also miss the big picture and the long-term potential of this potentially potent new generation of enterprise software applications.
In my studies of Enterprise 2.0 adoption, there are two major methods by which these new applications take hold. The first is the traditional model where the IT department or some part of the business decides at a high level to adopt these new tools and begins the process of evaluation, acquisition, deployment, training and adoption. This is the traditional model that most IT large-scale software acquisitions still use today.
The other model is where individuals take it upon themselves to find the best solutions to a given problem at hand and solve them creatively and collaboratively at a grassroots level. This is becoming increasingly more common, particularly in organizations that are less strongly hierarchical and I’ve identified this story in many large organizations, from AOL’s stunningly rapid viral adoption of MediaWiki (the open source platform that runs Wikipedia) to the story of a large utility company getting ready to roll out Enterprise 2.0 only to find that the majority of departments had already adopted a solution on their own.
This second form of adoption is one of the hallmarks of this new model for using software to solve business problems and it speaks volumes to how different they are from the previous generation of applications. So it’s worth spending a little time understanding exactly why and how they are so different. To explain this, I often refer to Read the rest of this entry »
April 17th, 2008
Web 2.0 success stories driving WOA and informing SOA
The striking contrast between the stories that we’ve been hearing lately about the slow going of SOA initiatives in the enterprise and the vibrant and rapidly growing ecosystems similar to them on the consumer Web has been generating a lot of debate and discussion in the enterprise IT community recently. This discussion was brought into sharp relief when ZDNet colleague Joe McKendrick recently reported on Burton Group’s Anne Manes stating that it “has become clear to me that SOA is not working in most organizations“, based on a wide ranging study they performed.
It’s become clear that the SOA world will have to change some basic assumptions.This is just one data point of many recently showing the continued shortfalls we’ve experienced in trying to get our enterprise systems to work together in the ways that we would like. Organizations clearly want to leverage high levels of interoperability to seize new business opportunities, innovate on top of existing assets, and properly leverage the extensive landscape of software, data, and infrastructure that most organizations have accumulated in large quantities over the years. But we are still having a great deal of difficulty doing so and SOA investments are just not reaping the types of return on investments that most businesses would like to have.
Looking for answers on how to improve SOA
This has driven a search for new models since there’s little question that the core ideas behind SOA seem to be the right ones. Rather, it’s been how we’ve gone about designing and implementing SOAs that appears to be at the crux of the issue. As we look at the most successful examples of SOA actually working, we keep being drawn back to the Web itself, with companies such as Amazon and their highly successful Web Services Division (with hundreds of thousands of business consumers of their global SOA), Google and its numerous and varied open Web APIs from Google Maps to Google Data, eBay and billions of dollars in listings it generates through its public SOA, or the rise of applications like Twitter (which gets 10 times the use through its APIs than from its user inteface) and applications that are primarily used via their SOA presence. Then there is the increasingly widespread adoption by millions of users of a sort of “visual SOA” with Web widgets and gadgets as well the rapidly growing story of software mashups, aka composite applications in the SOA world. There are many more SOA-ish success stories like this on the Web, but few in the enterprise.
John Musser’s ProgrammableWeb remains the best directory for finding all the APIs that Web companies have contributed to the Global SOA. Over 700 APIs are listed currently.
So if so-called Web 2.0 companies — which value participation almost above all else, both from consumers and organizations that want to integrate them into their offerings — are seeing highly desirable levels of adoption and significant ROI, how can this help understand how to improve our efforts in the enterprise? Most new Web 2.0 applications start out life with an API since getting connected to partners that will help you grow and innovate is a well-known essential for success online today. Despite years of SOA, we still don’t focus on consumption and openness as fundamentally essential characteristics to building an internal partner ecosystem that have beat a path to your door to use the services you are offering to them to build upon.
One big issue, as I’ve written about in the past, is
April 11th, 2008
Comparing Amazon’s and Google’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) Offerings
The announcement this week that Google released a beta version of a robust cloud computing platform called Google App Engine that lets anyone build apps on Google’s renowned and highly scalable infrastructure underscored a key trend in the software industry today. Namely that software platforms are moving from their traditional centricity around individually owned and managed computing resources and up into the “cloud” of the Internet.
Google’s entry into a space that has been largely dominated so far by Amazon and its Elastic Compute Cloud — as well as a few smaller players like Bungee and Heroku — has turned the Internet cloud computing space into a fully-fledged industry virtually overnight. What makes these offerings so interesting is their promise to turn enormous amounts of operational competency and accumulated economies of scale (which are enormous in Amazon’s and Google’s cases) into a highly competitive new software platform, akin to Windows or Linux, except entirely hosted off-premises and on the Internet.
Figure 1: Amazon and Google both offer comprehensive PaaS solutions
In this way, instead of just offering applications over the Web in the form of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Amazon and Google are actually offering an entire Platform-as-a-Service because they provide the foundational upon which to build highly scalable and robust Web-based applications in the same way that the traditional operating systems like Windows and Linux have done in the past for software developers. But what’s very different about this model is that no longer is the platform itself “sold” to the customer who then takes responsibility for running and maintaining it. In this model, it’s the very operational capability of the platform hosting that is the primary value here (and it’s how such platforms are typically billed). This has far reaching implications to both the business models of PaaS vendors as well as their customers.
In the traditional world of software platforms, the cost of the first copy of the platform was enormous, often requiring companies to invest hundreds of millions before they could offer the platform to their very first customer. And while that’s still true with PaaS, now the economics of these new online platforms extend to 24×365 operations, which of course, is the core competency of the Web 2.0 era and. The potentially ruinous continuous expense of not only providing the platform but providing all the computing resources (and facilities, power, and bandwidth) upon which your customers run their apps changes the rules of the game. Whoever can drive the most costs out of their supply chain while offering a rich, robust, and easy-to-use platform is likely to rule the roost.
This takes us to the capabilities of these platforms, which are just now being fully fleshed out and offered to the marketplace in a form that’s relatively complete (though we’ll see which pieces are still missing in a minute.) What’s interesting is that Amazon and Google have strategically built up an extensive set of services over the last few years and have made some very interesting assumptions that will determine who their customers are (consumers, startups, enterprises) and what type of business models can sit on top of them (advertising, subscriptions, cheapest source of outsourced computing resources).
For its part, Amazon’s Web Services Division has continued to grow regularly with new introductions on a regular basis with strategic components like SimpleDB to highly innovative services like
March 20th, 2008
Standards support for mashups emerge
The announcement earlier this week that IBM has put together an open approach for making user data secure inside of Web mashups, known as SMash, was the most recent step in an unfolding story about the way the industry is trying to bring structure and order to the rapidly growing and frequently unruly world of Web mashups.
As I’ve covered here in the past, mashups have enormous potential to allow more rapid and much less expensive development of online applications by emphasizing assembly over development, economies of scale by enabling high levels of reuse, and the consequent ability to rapidly get software solutions with the right data in the right place at the right time.
However, all is not rosy in the mashup space as I wrote last fall; there are significant challenges remaining before end-user or enterprise mashups can become a widespread reality despite the numerous offerings that exist today. Since then, I’ve only have one major new item to add to the list of adoption issues, namely that fact that most leading mashup solutions don’t provide a good enough SaaS delivery model. Consequently Yahoo! Pipes remains the best example of a mashup tool that has the requisite low barrier for use for widespread adoption, despite far more sophisticated and capable brethren from the likes of JackBe, Serena, and soon, Lotus, the latter which appears to be repackaging everything it learned with the impressive QEDWiki into an enterprise-class product.
Fortunately, good news is on the horizon for many of the issues I raised last year. It now appears that the mashup industry is heading in a direction which may make the space much more viable indeed over the next year. For example, two my biggest concerns, both non-starters for organizations that want to adopt a mashup model (21% of all organizations reported that they were interested last year), was 1) the lack of serious security and identity support and 2) not having a common standards for the assembly of Web parts such as widgets, gadgets, and other Web applications. Without knowing how to secure mashups, safely handle sensitive user and business data, or know where to make infrastructure and tooling bets, most organizations were likely to sit on the fence and wait until these risks were addressed.
IBM’s announcement this week about SMash was just one of many solutions now being offered resolve these two issues not only in the mashup space, but across the Web industry, as our personal and professional data gets more and more federated across the Internet and within our organizations. Efforts in this area include range from Google’s OpenSocial initiative to the push for adoption of DataPortability.org’s and OpenFriendFormat’s support which are all improving the world of data safety, security, and mobility in the mashup world as well.
But the most comprehensive and detailed plan for bringing standard approaches and techniques to mashups has to be OpenSAM, which leverages many existing standards such as WebDAV, openid, LDAP, and also subscribes to DataPortability.org’s standards to create a consistent and well-organized design and interaction model for offering complex, heterogeneous mashups to both the consumer and business community. Even more importantly, they cite a good number of companies already offering Web applications that support OpenSAM. The OpenSAM vision is broad and focused across the usage spectrum and the OpenSAM folks say that “once OpenSAM is added to an application, it can immediately join mashups with all other OpenSAM applications.”
While there is still a lot to sort out and the mishmash of standards can seem Read the rest of this entry »
February 4th, 2008
openid: The once and future enterprise Single Sign-On?
The decision two weeks ago by Yahoo! to support the burgeoning openid initiative, where users choose their preferred user account provider for logging into other Web sites, was a defining moment for the increasingly popular effort to bring order and sanity to the often confusing world of user identity on the Web. This major move by Yahoo! underscores how new models for user identity and security are becoming strategically important in the online world, and it also has long-term implications for the enterprise, as we’ll see.
Enterprises will be able to manage the growing problem of the proliferation of accounts created in external, off premises Web apps.There’s no doubt that Yahoo!’s addition of over 250 million accessible user accounts to openid, which can now be used to log into the thousands of openid-compliant Web sites, is a significant win for an initiative that is starting to reach critical mass. My own tests show that Yahoo!’s support for only the newer, more secure specification of openid greatly limits the number of external Web sites you can actually access with your Yahoo! account, however this issue will surely be resolved as more 3rd party sites adopt the new spec.
More interestingly, Yahoo! at this time does yet not allow 3rd party issued openids to be used to access its own Web properties. Why is this vital? Because it will fundamentally limit the usefulness of open Web identity, and openid; what’s the point of having an identity from your preferred provider — or as we’ll see below, from your workplace — if you can’t use it where you want to? This one way adoption of open Web identity is common among the major adopters in the space so far.
Provider-only support of open Web identity is going to be a major challenge for the movement until someone articulates the value proposition for allowing 3rd party authentication of accounts from other Web sites. Read Dare Obasanjo’s reasoning around this in the second half of this post.
Other major Web firms and software companies have been pursuing the grail of open — or mostly-open — Web identity for several years now, including most notably Microsoft and Google. Josh Catone over at Read/Write Web wrote yesterday about Microsoft’s stated intent to join the openid bandwagon, which will likely push the number of openid accounts well past half a billion, regardless of what happens with Microsoft’s acquisition play for Yahoo! This kind of scale of support will put open identity, and specifically openid, on the map and hopefully simplify and empower Web users around the world.
Open identity does push users into considering their Terms of Service of their provider much more carefully, since the’re making a long-term strategic decision with whom they’ll will invest with their Web identity, and whether they offer a good home for what may be their last new Web account ever. A quick examination of Microsoft’s Live ID (the open Web identity formerly known as Passport) shows how Microsoft has had to remake their service to be more open and friendly to users and businesses that support it. Expect that many of today’s identity providers will begin making their offerings more appealing for those shopping for their new Web super-identity. This will likely include, as we see, some enterprises.
What’s so important about open Web identity and how does it affect enterprise identity?
Well for one, when using openid sites that allow 3rd party identities, users need only Read the rest of this entry »
January 3rd, 2008
12 predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2008
The worlds of SOA, SaaS, and Web 2.0 have been swirling around each other for a couple of years now and in 2008 we’ll finally see these gel into a practical, modern vision of next generation enterprises. And a variety of forces are coming together to make 2008 the year that enterprises refit themselves for the 21st century.
The driving forces for change this year will be the aging of existing IT systems, the rise of up-and-coming new approaches such as highly capable new Web-based applications, mashups, collective intelligence powered business software, Web-oriented architectures, and last but certainly not least, social software. These are providing the raw materials to use upon the freshly cleared canvases many organizations are readying for themselves as many organizations begin to retool and upgrade. Even the IT foundations we’ve come to get so used to, such as the operating systems we’ve used for years, have recently evolved and not always in the direction we’re going. If nothing else, the ever-advancing computing environments of the workplace and the Web are encouraging us to move to newer and better models out of sheer momentum.
But the changes we’ll see happening in our organizations won’t just be ones that are imposed by necessity, many of them will be driven from the bottom up as we see more and more grassroots IT solutions sprouting up from the trenches of Web-savvy workers, while many existing initiatives, including traditional SOA efforts, intranets and portals, CRM, decision management, and many others get recast and sometimes entirely reinvented using the lessons we’ve learned from the Web 2.0 era over the last two years, with the leading factors being the large scale shift of control to users, lightweight new application types proven in efficacy and scale on the Web, and social computing with Web technologies.
1. SOA finally goes pragmatic, Web-oriented, and lightweight. We’ve heard this prediction before but in 2008 it will be one of the items front and center for IT departments for a variety of reasons. Many of the ponderous, heavyweight SOA initiatives still in existence will finally refactor their design principles and then their architectures to be much more lightweight and RESTful. The classic SOA principles will still apply but changes in how they are realized inside organizations will just reach the tipping point in 2008. One key driver is that organizations are increasingly tired of waiting for ROI on their SOA investments and the demand for change is pushing IT leaders to search for new, more effective approaches. Web-orientation has enabled SOA on the greater Web on a vast scale and gained credence for a critical mass of the SOA community.
Read about ongoing story of Web 2.0 and SOA convergence, which will be well under way by the end of 2008.
The bottom line: If a Web service/open API can’t be consumed in the browser, it will find itself relegated to the deep end of the back office, if not retired outright. That’s not to say that the infrastructure for SOAs is getting simplier or that browser consumption is the ultimate litmus test, it’s not. And as we’ll see below, high velocity, large scale governance will be required to get any use out of these new highly distributable models for projecting content and functionality to any point in the enterprise.
Pervasive syndication for enterprise data, particularly with ATOM and sometimes two way, will also be a bright spot this year but will remain a largely emerging story until 2009.
2. Enterprise search will remain broken or highly limited in most organizations. I’ve covered previously the many reasons why search can’t work in the typical enterprise without enormous effort and consequently this won’t be fixed for most organizations this year. However, good enterprise search is necessary to leverage the fast growing and woefully under-leveraged information warehoused in the vast acreages of most enterprise data centers. Workers are still left with literally no choice but to pull their information from the Web or sequentially rummage through various silos to piece together what they need instead of putting a few keywords in an enterprise search engine and scanning the results. The unfortunate news: The penetration of local search engines into enterprise data will only improve a handful of percentage points this year.
3. Security will become a major concern as Web 2.0 apps and SaaS make the edge of enterprises increasingly porous. In 2008 users will self-provision themselves with consumer Web applications across the firewall, more and more business information will be found out in the open in enterprise wikis, workers will spend more time in public social networking sites, and the very pliability of mashup-based applications will make it unclear where data comes from and where it’s going. This will make security around next generation platforms become a Read the rest of this entry »
December 27th, 2007
The top Enterprise Web 2.0 stories of 2007
Over the last year, we have witnessed the continuation of the steady movement of the mostly consumer-driven Web 2.0 phenomenon into the workplace that began as a trickle in 2006. Blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, social networking, end-user mashups, and even prediction markets saw their largest entry yet into businesses and institutions around the world. The platform wars may start to return in 2008 as Web 2.0 ideas taught companies how to turn an open platform into competitive advantage.The more technical side of Web 2.0 also began to see maturity as businesses started to rethink their service-oriented architectures to be more Web-like and the rich Internet application industry added many major new building blocks and platforms that push the envelope in terms of the kinds of interactive experiences the Web is able to deliver.
Last year’s Enterprise Web 2.0 watch phrase of “consumerization of the enterprise” was clearly evident in workplaces large and small this year, yet we also saw significant new shifts in the way we look at online platforms of all kinds to communicate, collaborate, be more productive, and innovate. You may recall that the Web 2.0 mantra of 2004-2006 was often focused on emergent uses of networks to harness collective intelligence and provide next generation user experiences on the Web. And like each successive generation of innovation on the Web and elsewhere, most early attempts to capitalize on these powerful new ideas were relatively unsuccessful, though the success stories (which resulted in half of the top 8 sites in the world at the moment) resulted in both superior products for the Web community to use and useful new techniques we could use to improve our own results.
In 2007, we also witnessed a new pragmatism as the Web 2.0 hype began to die down, the success stories emerged, and the non-so-successful continued to inform the industry with the lessons needed to navigate the rocky shoals of product development on the Web today. We also began to see Enterprise 2.0 make real penetration in business as well as social networking finally get some corporate respect and validation as a functional business tool that can bring tangible benefits to the workplace.
Read here for a recap on what Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are generally defined as.
2007 was also a year of innovation in the mobile Web space. The iPhone proved that mobile Web devices were still capable of near quantum leaps in improvement and innovation, Twitter demonstrated what was possible in the realm of truly network-oriented social software on mobile devices, and Google dramatically improved their mobile Web applications with innovative capabilities throughout the year, particularly with Google Maps Mobile. However, while the iPhone isn’t quite ready for enterprise use yet (though it will likely get their soon), both Twitter and Google Maps Mobile have become poster children for mobile consumer apps that have had successful cross-over to the business world as enormously useful tools in day to day work.
But a contrarian might say Read the rest of this entry »
October 30th, 2007
Significant workplace inroads for Enterprise 2.0?
According to a random poll I recently conducted on Facebook, just over a quarter of 300 respondents — 27% of them in all — answered in the affirmative that they are provided with an easy way at work to post on a blog or put information on a wiki. I often ask this same question to gatherings of people whenever I get the chance these days and have been getting roughly the same answer for the last few months. Businesses are apparently starting to take Web 2.0 for a more serious spin.
Blogs and wikis may finally be seeing fairly widespread “business approved” adoption in the workplace.A year ago, accessibility to blogs and wikis in the workplace was less than half this number in my informal sampling. The growth trend seems clear and appears to be increasing. So while this data might be fairly unscientific, I suspect the number is pretty accurate, and social media, aka Enterprise 2.0, is finally making some measurable inroads in the workplace despite a few open concerns about these mediums.
Facebook as a measure of social media in the general workplace?
Of course, Facebook users in general are probably more digitally literate than the average population, will look for blogs and wikis on the local Intranet to use, and thus some say they may be more likely to gravitate to workplaces and jobs that would provide an environment with familiar tools. However, one odd breakdown in the demographics of the poll is that the youngest group, 18-24 year-olds, reported the least access to social media. Perhaps it’s because this group also includes a great deal of students or that entry level workers don’t have as much computer access as workers farther up in the hierarchy.
Poll respondents were also pretty sure when they weren’t being provided with these tools with only 21% reporting that they didn’t know if they were being offered them. A whopping 52%, just over half, said that they had no social media tools offered to them in a way they could access.
The poll question was also carefully posed to uncover if tools were being “brought in the back door” by workers using the hundreds of free social media platforms out in the Web with their browser at work, or if the workplace itself was providing enterprise blogs and wikis. In my opinion, this makes the 27% “yes” number almost surprisingly high. But, while some respondents may not have parsed the question clearly, the trend is strong enough to stand on it’s own:
Blogs and wikis may finally be seeing fairly widespread “business approved” adoption in the workplace.
Getting good business outcomes from social media while managing downside
While blogs and wikis continue to show the potential to greatly improve collaboration, create higher levels of knowledge retention, and generate more reusable business information over time, it’s also probable that Read the rest of this entry »
October 27th, 2007
SaaS and Office 2.0 evolving towards Enterprise 2.0?
Yesterday on the Boston waterfront at the Reinventing the Enterprise summit, a lively panel of industry luminaries discussed and debated the topic of the event: How enterprises are dealing with the powerful transformational forces from the Web 2.0 era that are reshaping the workplace today. The issues and concerns around adoption and governance of Enterprise 2.0 was a hot topic.
The panel conversation (pictured right) between Harvard’s Andrew McAfee, creator of the Web 2.0 in business viewpoint he’s famously dubbed Enterprise 2.0, as well as SocialText’s Michael Idinopulos and Forrester’s Rob Koplowitz ranged across the intellectual terrain, highlighting the lessons learned so far as well as uncovered some interesting insights. In particular, one key point that came up from the audience several times was whether we really have to move to entirely new models for IT applications such as blogs and wikis or should we also “Enterprise 2.0 enable” our current IT systems.
More on the Enterprise 2.0 enablement of older application models in a moment, since I do believe that is starting to happen and will likely be a significant adoption path for some organizations and types of applications.
First, some other highlights of the panel:
- Most of us are using the wrong tools. McAfee polled the audience and asked how many of them routinely engage in collaborative authoring. Virtually everyone raised their hands. He then asked, “so how come we are still using sole authoring tools for collaborative work?” He point was that we’re still emailing around word processing documents and spreadsheets when Enterprise 2.0-style collaborative tools exist that do a better job. My personal view is that our software consumption habits are still so ingrained from the last 20 years of the tools we’ve had on our desktops that our migration to better solutions has been slowed. Not to mention that many of these new tools, like Google Docs in my discussion below, are just now getting good enough for serious business use and finally contain enough Enterprise 2.0 ingredients to be a significant improvement
- Worries on misuse. Another issue that came up was whether the globally visible and persistent platforms for self-expression offered by Enterprise 2.0 tools would be misused by employees. One audience member noted that their organization had discovered an employee scalping tickets inappropriately on their internal blog and it gave them some concern. The panel returned that these kinds of activities already happen in the workplace via e-mail or around the water cooler and Enterprise 2.0 platforms just make it more visible and ultimately less riskier, since inappropriate behavior can better be spotted in this platforms. They also noted that blog posts can be “unposted” but e-mails are much harder to unsend. And this is a key point, since McAfee also noted on the panel that worries over inappropriate use of Enterprise 2.0 tools in the workplace is still a major concern by business leaders. It’s that by transforming how an organization thinks about governance by moving it from less central control to more peer control: The business can actually reduce risk overall since public platforms for collaboration allow all employees to see the organization-wide activity of the internal blogosphere and wikisphere, spot inappropriate behavior, and nip it in the bud instead of letting it happen undetected and unaddressed.
- Enterprise 2.0 goes retroviral? An audience member asked whether it might not just make more sense if the increasingly popular blog and wikis models just be one view on top of our pre-existing content. Traditional business productivity documents could then be exposed as wiki pages and opened for network-based editing instead of trapped in silos. E-mail threads could be turned into blogs, making them more visible, putting feeds on them, adding comments, and allowing them to be discovered via search. This might indeed be a useful approach for user uptake and adoption and one that we might indeed see happening more, particularly as Web-based business productivity applications such as Google Docs and Zoho Suite continue to blur the difference between traditional SaaS and Office 2.0. As we’ll see below, they seem to be evolving more into Enterprise 2.0 tools every day.
So it’s this last point that’s worth exploring Read the rest of this entry »
October 22nd, 2007
The state of Enterprise 2.0
Industry analysts, CIOs, and business leaders around the world are continuing to try to read the industry tea leaves in 2007 when it comes to the subject of Enterprise 2.0, the increasingly popular discussion of using Web 2.0 platforms in the workplace. The primary topic of interest? Whether Enterprise 2.0 brings real bang for the buck by making the daily work of organizations measurably more productive, efficient, and innovative. Investors and executives are just not going to make significant bets on Enterprise 2.0 in terms of resources and risk exposure without good information on the likely returns of implementation.
The increasing pervasiveness of the tools and awareness of Enterprise 2.0 will continue to have a growing impact on our businesses for better and worse.Up until recently, the lack of mature Enterprise 2.0 products, good case studies, and feedback from early experiences that successfully dealt with some of the challenges that these frequently disruptive and occasionally subversive tools introduced. This immature state of affairs was often holding back even corporate pilots of highly promising candidate Enterprise 2.0 technologies such as enterprise blogs, wikis, and even mashups.
However, increasing evidence abounds that Enterprise 2.0 adoption has begun in earnest with a typical example being Wells Fargo taking the plunge, having rolled out Enterprise 2.0 platforms to 160,000 workers. It has become clear that we’re moving out of the early pioneer phase to a broader acceptance phase. From the production side, a brand new analysis indicates that the business social software market will be nearly $1 billion strong this year and over $3.3 billion by 2011. In these and other ways, such as the growing collection of success stories, Enterprise 2.0 has arrived.
The big question for many of those on the fence now is: 1) Do we now have the right capabilities in terms of ready Enterprise 2.0 products? And 2) Do we generally understand how to apply them properly to obtain good returns on our investment in them? Knowing the answers to both questions will almost certainly tell us if we’re ready for mainstream adoption of adoption of Enterprise 2.0 any time soon.
Enterprise 2.0 redux
Professor Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School famously introduced the term and concepts behind Enterprise 2.0 last year and it’s had a heady ride across the industry and in the press ever since. Initially defined by McAfee as “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers”, the broader global community has attempt to expand, reinvent, and co-opt Enterprise 2.0 with varying degrees of success. But the essential, core meaning has largely stayed the same: Social applications that are optional to use, free of unnecessary structure, highly egalitarian, and support many forms of data.
McAfee even coined a mnemonic to make it easy for everyone to remember what appeared to be the key aspects of these social platforms. Called SLATES, it was an easy checklist to verify that the tools you were considering had the right essential ingredients. Under this initial definition Web 2.0 poster children blogs and wikis were identified as Enterprise 2.0 platforms (provided that they provided reasonable support for SLATES) as well as more sophisticated tools such as prediction markets and even vertical business applications like customer directed taxi cab dispatching were given as early examples of richer Enterprise 2.0 applications.
What platforms failed to make the cut as Enterprise 2.0 because they didn’t have the qualities that were believed to be important for better business outcomes? These included most corporate intranets and portals, most groupware, as well as e-mail and “classic” instant messaging. Why? They either didn’t provide access to a voice for workers to communicate and collaborate with or they didn’t create results that were persistent and globally visible. In the end, Enterprise 2.0 takes most of the potent ideas of Web 2.0, user generated content, peer production, and moves them into the workplace.
Did the original articulation of Enterprise 2.0 have the right Read the rest of this entry »
A veteran of software development, Dion Hinchcliffe has been working for two decades with leading-edge methods to accelerate project schedules and raise the bar for software quality. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
