November 12th, 2009

Enterprise 2.0: What do we know today about moving our organizations into the 21st century?

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 4:18 am

Categories: Architecture of Participation, Blogs, Business Process Management, Collaboration, Collective Intelligence, Community, Community Management, Customer Community, Design Patterns, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0, Enterprise Wikis, Governance, Grassroots Community, Hype, Innovation marketplace, Social CRM, Social Computing, Social Economy, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Software, Social media, Social networks, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Wikis

Tags: Social Computing, Enterprise 2.0, Dion Hinchcliffe

We spend 60-80% of our time in the workplace on interaction and collaborative activity. This week in Frankfurt at the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT and last week at the inaugural Enterprise 2.0 Conference West in San Francisco has been an good microcosm of the state of the industry.

It does appear that we’re entering a new stage in the maturity of enterprise social computing. The good news: Most of the lessons learned are good ones, yet as we’ll see, some challenges remain.

Based on my conversations with practitioners and thought leaders here and the many discussions over the last two weeks, the practice of Enterprise 2.0 has effectively moved beyond the initial novelty of years past. There’s now a much more practical focus on how to create, manage, and govern social business communities, the specific ways to deliver measurable business value, and most of all, a desire to learn what works best (or not) in the realm of collaboration and social software.

The broad outlines of what it actually takes to apply new social business models have emerged lately along with the techniques to deliver on them successfully in the longer term. In particular, these include topics such as business case, tool selection, worker policies, community management, and the governance of social business environments.

Just as importantly, we are also starting to see customers implementing Enterprise 2.0 in scale. These typically include enterprise social networking, wikis, and social CRM. This is different than a year ago when there were only a handful of stories about Fortune 1000 and Global 2000 companies seriously exploring the potential benefits of social computing.

In the sense that the hard work has started, we are also seeing the end of the beginning for Enterprise 2.0. We’ve learned a lot along the way, particularly from early adopters, and it has been interesting to participate back-to-back in two of the largest enterprise social computing events of the season. This has helped get a sense of what’s taking place in Europe and North America with customers as well as the industry growing up around Enterprise 2.0 in terms of tools and services.

Related: Social applications are now well-entrenched in enterprise networks around the globe

Where is Enterprise 2.0 headed?

Here are my top takeaways from the discussions, research, and findings here in Frankfurt this week and San Francisco last week:

• Businesses are actively seeking information about how best to implement Enterprise 2.0. While last year they were kicking the tires and evaluating what the benefits are (establishing why) there’s a lot more actual project activity this year and this is driving significant demand for knowledge about how. The rise of the 2.0 Adoption Council is one demonstration of this need to share information about what works. Further providing evidence that there’s a need for how: A recent survey showed that 36% of their members were currently managing multi-million dollar budgets this year for Enterprise 2.0. In other words, they’re in the “how” stage. Finally, the end-users I talked with in my workshops at both events demanded detailed, specific information about how to make Enterprise 2.0 work for their businesses.

  

• There is still lots of debate about how to

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October 5th, 2009

Twenty-two power laws of the emerging social economy

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 1:41 pm

Categories: Architecture of Participation, Business Models, Cloud computing, Collaboration, Collective Intelligence, Community, Community Management, Cost-effective scalability, Crowdsourcing, Customer Community, Customer Self-Service, Design Patterns, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0, Grassroots Community, Innovation marketplace, Network effects, Social Computing, Social Economy, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Software, The Long Tail, Two-Way Web, User Generated Content, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform

Tags: Web, Knowledge, Information Technology, Knowledge Economy, Amara, Strategy, Web 2.0, Management, Internet, Dion Hinchcliffe

Traditional measures of business success are becoming less and less important.There is a time for big picture thinking and there is a time for details in business and IT, the latter which make business and technical strategy a reality and the former which provides needed direction and focus.

Highlighting the big picture side last week we saw Steve Ballmer’s exploration of the efficiencies he believes are being driven by something he calls “the new normal”. In this view, he tries to frame up how a reset of economic expectations during the downturn has created an environment that is putting pressure on business to do more with less, affecting IT at least as much as the rest of the organization, if not more.

We’ve seen also seen similar and broader variations on this theme this year, such as John Hagel’s capable attempt to define the “Big Shifts” in business taking place in this century. Just recently McKinsey published a similar reported titled The 10 Trends You Have to Watch: And What They Mean For IT in the Harvard Business Journal (summary is by Gartner).

If we factor out the commonalities in these views, it highlights a core set of strategic trends in IT and business in 2009, namely:

• New resource constraints. Today’s new economic baselines (the downturn, green business, etc) are requiring that we find ways to accomplish our goals using fewer resources. This includes identifying the means to capture opportunity and transform “in process” business activities using newer, more efficient models. Business leaders will need to effectively link IT and business much more so than in the past to accomplish the movement to this new baseline. This also doesn’t mean everything is constrained. As we’ll see on the technology side, abundance is being produced that may address shortcomings in the business side.
• Value shifting from transactions to relationships. This is the growing realization that the traditional rote business transaction as the core source of organizational value is diminishing and value is now coming from relationship dynamics. This has many implications including using new management methods (example: from top down command-and-control to community curator and facilitator), tapping into new reservoirs of innovation, adopting new ways of interacting with customers, or driving better tacit interactions. Web 2.0 and social computing will be key enablers of this for business units and IT organizations that want increased relevance.
• Industries in flux with new ones emerging. Previously stable industries such as finance and media are feeling the pinch the strongest, but most others are as well. The recession is creating a bigger gap between healthy and unhealthy businesses while many industries are being unbundled or transformed into new ones (traditional software companies moving to SaaS and cloud computing for example or the rise of crowdsourcing competing with outsourcing at the low end.) Again, today’s dynamic Web-driven global knowledge flows and agile online models for computing and collaboration — as well as economic and intellectual production — are now a significant change agent.
• Moving from change as the exception to change as the norm. Today we’re seeing faster consumer behavior shifts, quicker pricing changes, more rapid product cycles, and faster media feedback loops. While this can also lead to more extreme market conditions, it also enables opportunities to be turned into bottom-line impact for organizations that can adapt to market realities quickly enough. The network is the culprit (and solution) for much of this again: We now have pervasive social media instantly transmitting and shaping cultural phenomenon and faster financial cause-and-effect in the markets, real-time online markets, and so on. In the 21st century, following a plan is increasingly less important than responding actively and effectively to change.
• A shift of control to the edge of organizations. This has been predicted at least as far back as the Cluetrain Manifesto, if not farther. It’s not even really a shift, it’s more like the addition of a new dimension to how we operate organizationally, something I’ve referred to previously as “social business.” This new addition changes the dynamics of where useful information comes from, how decisions are made, and how more autonomy and self-organization will be needed (and tolerated) in modern organizations to meet more dynamic and changing global marketplace.

As I explored recently in “How the Web OS has begun to reshape IT and business”, today’s Internet has become a central driver of how we do things today. It’s the richest marketplace that

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September 28th, 2009

Community management: The 'essential' capability of successful Enterprise 2.0 efforts

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 2:21 pm

Categories: Collaboration, Community, Community Management, Customer Community, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0, Grassroots Community, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Software, Web 2.0

Tags: Community, Enterprise 2.0, Social Collaboration, Tool, Community Management, Community Manager, Productivity, Dion Hinchcliffe

You wouldn’t provide new software to users without proper support. The case must be made that you can’t do the same with social environments. It’s not a skill that’s been widely understood until quite recently, however community management has begun to move to the forefront of discussions about enterprise social computing as the use of social tools begins to climb the maturity curve. Now community management is increasingly proving not just useful but a critical component of Enterprise 2.0 efforts despite an often vague understanding of what it is and where it should be situated in the org chart.

Community management itself can be sensitive subject in the social media arena. Some believe that to be authentic and to grow properly online communities should be as completely self-organized and “unmanaged” as possible. In this vision they should be free of corporate heavy-handedness or even immediate business requirements, thereby allowed to grow organically and naturally to fruition without the chill of censorship or excessive expectation. In this view, as the utility of things like PCs, e-mail, and computer networks became self-evident, workers naturally found all sorts of good uses for them, and the same goes for social tools.

Others believe that there must be some central oversight as well as guidance and support to accomplish anything useful with social software, especially in a business context. This view prescribes the need to actively deal with any potential risks such as inappropriate use, low return on investment, and lack of alignment with business goals. In other words, the business must also have a seat at the community table while helping it ensure the effort has what it needs to succeed.

Click To Enlarge

The truth is probably somewhere in between and most likely a bit more towards self-interested oversight than in the other direction. But how can we really determine this? Although my own research has started showing a strong correlation between successful Enterprise 2.0 efforts and well-organized and properly resourced community management, I wanted a broader, more current snapshot of what’s really happening with community management and the use of social tools today. To do this I needed some good data and luckily for me I knew just who I could ask.

Surveying Enterprise 2.0 practitioners

So a couple of weeks ago I reached out to my good friend Susan Scrupski, a maven of all things social computing in the enterprise and — not coincidentally — founder of The 2.0 Adoption Council, a rapidly growing private community of practitioners of Enterprise 2.0 whose 100+ members are mostly from large Fortune 500 efforts. This group, which represents some of the largest companies in the world, might be able to give us a snapshot of their experiences with community management. I inquired if she could ask the council the following question:

How important has community management been to your Enterprise 2.0 effort?

A. Essential

B. Important

C. Not that important

Susan kindly agreed and recently reported the results to me. Although I’d been pretty confident that community management was going to score well based on 1) what I’ve seen from other projects, 2) a growing body of anecdotal information, and 3) the findings from case studies that I’ve seen reported recently, I was still pretty surprised at the results, even given the small but influential sample, which you can see below:

Community Management Survey Results:

Click To Enlarge

The vast majority of the respondents, 95% of them, rated community management as “essential” to their Enterprise 2.0 effort. The remainder listed it as “important”. None of them reported it as “Not that important”. While there is always the possibility of groupthink in results like this, it’s fascinating that community management, while still barely rating a few lines of description in pro-Web 2.0 sources such as Wikipedia, has become such an important aspect of online communities.

Some of the comments that respondents to the survey gave are worth repeating here as well, which I do below with permission from Susan. For example, I especially liked this vignette of community management at CSC, a large, well-known business services company:

While the whole idea of Enterprise 2.0 has at its source crowdsourcing and peer support/interaction - some times users just need guidance and support. Users will have questions. You need someone worrying about the right help content, seeding discussions, guiding users as they ask questions. And in fact, you don’t just need one community manager, but a solid network of community managers. So yes, we have one ‘community manager’ so to speak (actually several of us share the role) but then many ‘chief champions’… No matter how easy a tool is to use, there are still those that have questions and need ‘community coaching’ (I’m talking about the business piece of community leadership) and general guidance. — Claire Flanagan, Sr. Mgr, KM and Enterprise Social Software Strategy, CSC

There were also more general statements of affirmation like:

I can’t imagine a success story without some manner of engagement/governance/particpation. — Megan Murray, Community Manager/Project Coordinator, Booz Allen Hamilton

We also saw some of the shades of Enterprise 2.0 failure causes such as the tool-first instead of community-first approach as well as the recurrence of the now-familiar suitability of SharePoint for Enterprise 2.0 discussion. Both of these, as we’ve seen on other projects as well, tends to leave community management efforts under funded and without the resources to make the effort succeed:

SharePoint has been pitched as a plug-and-play solution for collaboration and community. We now know it is certainly not - but this expectation has resulted in under-budgeting for community management resources. Adjusting that expectation, and the implications for the “TCO” of SharePoint will be essential for Enterprise 2.0 and community building to succeed. I think this applies to any collaboration or e20 solution, not just SharePoint: Vendors and IT groups who pitch a platform may be failing to account for the community leader role as a key element to success. — Abigail Lewis-Bowen, Johnson & Johnson

Though the act of community management has been taking place since the advent of online conversations going back to newsgroups, open source development projects, and discussion forums, it’s only now starting to get serious attention as a technique for managing social collaboration within organizations.

Community Management: Not new but newly focused on social collaboration

But what exactly does a community manager do?

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