Category: Collaboration
February 9th, 2010
First impressions of Google Buzz: Smart, useful, long road ahead
The real question is whether Buzz has arrived in enough time to make a big enough difference for Google in the social computing race. Earlier this afternoon Google Buzz went live after a comprehensive launch event streamed live over YouTube. Buzz is a brand-new social tool that helps users to share updates, links, photos, videos, and more with the online world at large.
Google founder Sergey Brin has been quoted as saying that Buzz gives us the ability to post a message to the Web without a ‘to’ line. The service is location-aware and works on the Web via Gmail or using a mobile interface on the iPhone or Android.
Given the huge amount of coverage already of this announcement, I’m not going to review the features of Google Buzz in detail, you can find that from the live coverage captured by ZDNet’s Sam Diaz or the just-posted screenshot gallery. Below are my first impressions of Google Buzz from a strategic point of view, which I was able to use for a short while before writing this post.
An analysis of Google Buzz
One of the few places that Google doesn’t dominate the Web today is in the social arena. It’s a world where Facebook has a large lead and where Google isn’t even #2 or #3. Consequently any entries that Google makes in this space are going to be very closely watched indeed. This happened with Google Wave last year and there’s likely to be a virtual mountain of analysis and dissection before it’s all done with this service.
My take: Google Buzz is well-designed and useful but it’s going to be seriously challenged because the very people most likely to be interested in Buzz will already have places to carry out their online social activities. This means Google Buzz may end up being more useful in places where there’s a lot less dominance by the consumer Social Web, such as in the enterprise.
In no particular order, here’s why Google Buzz is significant nonetheless, for as much for how it tells us how Google looks at the world of social computing as for the way these capabilities will almost certainly migrate and blur into a common social feature set in other Google products such as iGoogle, YouTube, and Picasa.
- Buzz is an intelligent personal activity stream that’s designed to scale. Buzz is not just a FriendFeed-like aggregator of everyone you know; it uses analysis to try to sort out what makes the most sense to you at the moment. A few minutes using Buzz convinced me that this is going to be essential if the service isn’t going to be overwhelming. It’s already fairly addictive with just a few followers, I can only imagine when you have hundreds. A few commentators, such as Jeff Jarvis, have already (rightly) pegged this a major attempt to address what Clay Shirky calls filter failure to cope with the information explosion challenge of social media and Enterprise 2.0. As Google pointed out in their introduction, dealing with this problem effectively in scale has significant business benefits. In particular, it’ll be very good for Google’s
February 4th, 2010
SAP's 12Sprints joins the social enterprise bandwagon
A clear business focus helps, but 12Sprints must go up against SharePoint. I spent some time this morning working with SAP’s new 12Sprints collaboration service, which was announced earlier this week. Available free in open beta immediately, it’s a cloud-based service that’s a cross between Basecamp and Google Wave and is ostensibly designed for team collaboration.
Not incidentally, 12Sprints is also clearly a social application and it includes viral invitation, extensive commenting and discussion capabilities, and interesting new twists on measuring community opinion such as real time consensus tracking.
Make no mistake, 12Sprints shows its SAP heritage and comes across as a sober-minded business tool, even if it’s not necessarily an enterprise-wide solution. It joins the ranks of a growing number of new next-generation enterprise collaboration efforts from major vendors that take social computing and Enterprise 2.0 seriously, including IBM’s new Project Vulcan, Google Wave, Salesforce Chatter, TIBCO’s Tibbr, and arguably Microsoft SharePoint 2010.
Not that 12Sprints is neither as large and complex as SharePoint nor a grand unified vision like Project Vulcan or Chatter. Instead it has a solid focus on on-the-ground collaborative decision making, group discussion, and project planning. It’s clear though that it can grow far beyond these functions with its open architecture and flexible structure and will likely do so as it matures.
12Sprint’s activities for social collaboration
The basis of operation for 12Sprints is the activity, which can be one of the following types below. An unlimited number of these can be engaged in at any time and a search function and various timelines are offered to make large amounts of activities manageable and navigable.
- Prioritization Activity. Create shared goals/objectives, rank them, and capture the final outcome
- Project Planning Activity. Define a timeline, project objectives and goals
- Decision Activity. Define a situation, set options, gather consensus, reach a final decision, obtain sign off
- Discussion Activity. Define a topic for discussion, build a threaded discussion, capture the results
- Meeting Activity. Arrange a meeting, record notes, capture decisions and action items, and define next steps
- Research Activity. Define a research topic, collect and share relevant artifacts
- Blank Activity. A freeform slate for collaborative activities.
It’s important to note that 12Sprints doesn’t try to be the best at everything, a fault that’s endemic to large enterprise application suites and which is wisely avoided here. It does however integrate with best-of-breed services where it makes sense, whether they’re from SAP or not. This includes WebEx, Evernote, and Scribd, with the first two custom-integrated and the latter as part of their extensions program. With extensions any developer can onboard their functionality to 12Sprints, which offers users an experience not dissimilar to an app store and makes it possible for anyone to enhance the platform.
Who will find 12Sprints compelling?
February 3rd, 2010
Social CRM: Ground zero for Enterprise 2.0 in 2010
Successfully maintaining meaningful and sustained relationships with customers has become a critical skill in a 21st century. What if customers were often the best people to help other customers? That’s the basic premise of an emerging class of enterprise software usually referred to these days as “Social CRM” and which I covered in some detail late last year.
The general concept is that managing customer relationships in the classical way, meaning transactionally and one-on-one can be greatly improved by making the relationship less structured, more participatory, and created around an open community model. Social CRM can manifest itself in many ways, including self-organizing affinity groups within customer communities or by co-managing customer support requests in a shared, open venue, to describe just two popular approaches of many.
These new approaches do appear to transform the relationship that companies have their their partners and customers and are getting on the radar of customer support, product development, and marketing departments this year. But what’s at the core of this approach that separates it from traditional CRM?
My good friend and ZDNet blogger Michael Krigsman came away with the following perspective in his recent interview with CRM guru Paul Greenberg:
Successful customer relationships are based on interacting, cooperating, and collaborating with customers to provide mutual value. Technology is an important enabler but is secondary to relationship.
There’s been some debate recently on whether Social CRM is part of the broader Enterprise 2.0 story and I think from the statement above it’s clear that it is, and it’s even more so when you look at close up in the wild. It’s worth visiting GetSatisfaction for good real world examples from major, well-known firms.
Social CRM: Enterprise 2.0 with Customers
Enterprise 2.0 itself is popular term that captures the use of lightly structured social environments to collaborate and capture knowledge in a discoverable, reusable way. Typically, these tools are highly social (but don’t necessarily have to be) and they’re freeform, so that they can adapt to the problem at hand. Finally, Enterprise 2.0 is generally applied in a business setting between at least one to three types of participants: workers, trading partners, and customers. Social CRM fits the bill for all of these criteria, and of course, spans the full range of all three participants.
A typical Social CRM scenario is when customers want to communicate their problems (customer support) or desires (future product development requirements) to an organization and they’re then given a social channel to do so. This channel could be as simple as a forum so that they can delve into their issue into more detail with the company and other customers. Or it might be something more deliberately structured to help customers support each other or to capture innovation. This structure might involve assigning case numbers or submission IDs and add them to an open, searchable database that can then be updated by anyone.
Whatever the method that is chosen (and it should be as open and freeform as possible), the key to effective Social CRM is that
January 20th, 2010
The social Web in 2010: The emerging standards and technologies to watch
Social media data flow will likely be open and standardized soon, but not the social applications themselves, keeping the walled gardens up between social apps for the time being. The emergence of Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the social Web as a global force in the last several years has done a great deal to highlight their potential to fundamentally alter the way we communicate and collaborate both at home and in business. However, despite the movement of social computing into our daily lives we’re all clearly on a long journey together as the technologies themselves emerge from infancy.
The state-of-the-art today when it comes to the social computing environments that surround us now — in our browsers, mobile devices, and elsewhere — underscores how much more we have left to do to make these new modes of digital conversation and discourse become mature, efficient, safe, and truly useful.
Fortunately the Web doesn’t stand still and a great deal of research and development continues to go into evolving the mechanics of today’s online social universe. There are presently many new efforts under way to refine and improve the world of social media, some of which we’ll explore here and many which are just beginning.
The consumer Web continues to drive social business
While some advances in social media are happening in the enterprise space as well, the real story continues to be the Web as it continues to forge quickly ahead in terms of sheer innovation and raw output to shape the latest developments in social computing.
Naturally, we’ll likely see some of these attempts fall by the wayside in the relentlessly Darwinian environment of the Internet. We’ll also see many of them succeed because of their broad engagement with the Web community, apparent utility, and subsequent widespread adoption.
As for 2010, it’s shaping up to be a year of general improvement in the business and technology industries hard hit by recession, the impact of which has seemed to hold back new investment and experimentation in social technologies, many of which are funded by staff participation from Internet firms. But it’s now looking to be a banner year for significant advances in social software standards and technologies, many of them to address well-known shortcomings and inconveniences in today’s Web 2.0 landscape.
The Social Web Challenges of 2010: A List
What are the challenges with the social Web today? For one, its very size is now an issue. The social Web has virtually exploded over the last three years, going from tens of millions of users to many hundreds of millions of users.
It has also entered the late majority of the mainstream population, meaning that many of the ways that it works will not be as accessible to those least familiar with it. But the “social Web” has practically just become “the Web” at this point. Social computing is now something that most people do at least in some form on an almost daily basis. Along the way we’ve all learned some of the shortcomings of today’s social tools and environments. Indeed, the very success of this mode of online interaction has begun to pose its own issues. In a nutshell, these issues are:
- Fragmentation of conversation. The blogosphere is a case in point with its highly decentralized nature that breaks up discussion into a series of links that have to be chased down. The decentralization is good in many cases but we’re also learning it can hurt consumption and participation. This is the same with competing activity streams in various social networks. While the focus perhaps should instead be on the conversations themselves and integrating them across whatever platforms within which they are taking place, the view today is instead still too much on individual tools and channels. Up until now linking, syndication, and shared comment services have been used to connect the dots on distributed conversations but the practical usefulness of these approaches has been reached in many cases. The time is right to use the model of the Web to make it easier to put a conversation or collaborative activity into central focus, no matter where the underlying inputs come from. This is something that Google is attempting to do with its Wave format and remains an approach to watch.
- Disconnects between older and newer generations of social media. The latest new social media platforms — particularly the large social network services — are highly centralized compared to their much more distributed antecedents such as blogs and wikis. There are great differences between the way information flows from these services across the Web, how identity is established between them (and verified or not), and whether the embedded application models are standardized or not (Facebook brings real app standardization to the table and the ability to tap deeply into social data for example, while blogs/wikis don’t offer much of either), to name a couple of key ssues. These disconnects lead to unnecessary barriers to participation, reach, investment, and ultimately value.
- Lack of control of identity, contacts, and data. This has been a subject of debate for years and it’s still fairly difficult to export contacts from many social networking platforms. At the same time it’s been getting easier and easier to use the identity of choice at your favorite social media site to establish an identity and log in using OpenID or Facebook Connect. Data portability itself, outside of social graph information, is slowly improving with many online services supporting OAuth and other means of 3rd party data access such as open APIs, but there’s a long way to go as we’ll see before we have full flexibility and control of our online identity and data. This has various implications for businesses that want to engage more fully in the social Web ranging from the ability to establish a unified social identity to having positive control over their own data.
- A better social Web on mobile devices. While this area has improved enormously in the last few years with a virtual parade of mobile applications aimed at the social space (particularly on the iPhone and Android), both existing applications as well as more mobile-focused social networking services such as FourSquare and BrightKite are attempting to make mobile a far more meaningful social experience. But there’s lots more to do here before the mobile social Web catches up to the browser-based experience.
- Poor integration between
December 21st, 2009
ZDNet's Enterprise Web 2.0: The top 10 posts of 2009
As we get ready to enter the final year of the decade, here’s a round-up of what you found interesting here on Enterprise Web 2.0 based on actual readership. We’ll see what the new year brings us but 2009 was full of notable developments that will have a lasting impact to way we using technology in business.
This year was significant for next-generation IT and business, particularly with the rapid rise of cloud computing and emerging trends in social computing. The “Great Recession” of 2009 itself was also a top subject here as well as strategic business transformation using Web 2.0 technologies.
So based on what readers found most intriguing or otherwise worthy of their attention, here’s a breakdown of what the top 10 posts here on ZDNet’s Enterprise Web 2.0, in reverse order of popularity:
10. Eight ways that cloud computing will change business
June 5th, 2009: I called this major new trend in on-demand enterprise IT a “delicate balance of risk and benefit” and noted that “cloud computing is quickly beginning to shape up as one of the biggest new IT trends. Hundreds of thousands of business customers are already using cloud offerings from Amazon (Amazon Web Services), Salesforce (Force.com), and Google (many offerings, including Google App Engine), including a growing number of Fortune 500 companies.”
Read the rest here.
9. Are the iPhone and social networks making the classic Web and intranet obsolete?
October 25th, 2009: Social networking sites like Facebook or mobile apps on platforms like the iPhone, Palm’s new webOS, and Android, will ultimately herald a change in the way that we work with our IT systems in the enterprise. The once relatively unified world of the Internet, with a few major top-level types of access directly connected to it (browser, e-mail, IRC client, newsreader, etc.) and a few key sub-apps such as search that virtually everyone online used have been extended — as well as fragmented — into popular new channels into which users are now rapidly moving en masse.
Read the rest here.
8. Comparing Amazon’s and Google’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) Offerings
April 11th, 2008: My only major post from 2008 which made the top ten this year again, showing the sustained interest in cloud computing, particularly specific comparisons of two of the top players in the space. I noted back then that “the decision for enterprises on how far to leverage computing platforms in the cloud will be.. complicated.“
The economics will increasingly make more sense to run business applications on these new platforms now that major competition has emerged in the PaaS marketplace that will put major downward pressure on already strikingly low costs to operate. But the issues around governance, security, privacy, and control will be hard to overcome. Make no mistake however, these platforms offer not only major cost savings but non-trivial productivity boosts as they competitively strive to be the cheapest and lowest barrier place online to run your business applications and engage your employees, customers, and partners.
Read the rest here.
7. Using Web 2.0 to reinvent your business for the economic downturn
January 29th, 2009: Some business leaders will be looking at paring things back to the basics [in 2009] while a different sort will be looking at entirely new avenues to survive and thrive. The decisions we make now can greatly affect what happens to our organizations going forward. The good news is that most enterprises actually have a fair number of compelling options right now if they are willing to think outside the box. While some might look at the social aspects of things like Web 2.0 as marginal subjects when things get tough, nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to the deeper implications of Web 2.0 in the enterprise.
Read the rest here.
6. Twitter for your enterprise: 17 microblogging tools for business
June 1st, 2009: As a Web-based consumer application, you quickly discover that while Twitter itself is a terrific environment, it isn’t very usable yet for businesses because of it lacks a variety of capabilities needed to fully work on the local intranet (details on this below). You wonder what other options exist to bring microblogging to the workplace in a business-friendly manner. Plenty, it turns out.
Read the rest here.
5. Eight Predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2009
January 13th, 2009: As for 2009, I predict a rebuilding year for most organizations, with a few that will use innovative new ideas to break out with major successes. With the large network effects that have been built online over the last few years by the major internet players, we will have fewer fast growth businesses in the major categories, but there is still plenty of
December 17th, 2009
Enterprise 2.0: The 2009 year in review
We’ve learned this year that we’re going to have to create better filters and business intelligence analytics for the vast quantities of knowledge accumulating in social environments. It’s that time of year again, when we look back at the year that was while making next year’s technology and business predictions. 2009 was an exciting year across the board for all things Web 2.0 in the enterprise and related topics. I often find that it’s when we take time to look back at the big picture that we get the best sense for what’s actually happening in the marketplace today.
So I’ll be examining at Enterprise 2.0, cloud computing, and next-generation SOA in this vein over the next couple of weeks, with the year-in-reviews first and then predictions, so please stay tuned.
We’ll start first with Enterprise 2.0, which had a banner year by just about any account. I’ve been working in this space now since it first began back in 2006 (read my first post on Enterprise 2.0), and it’s amazing to see how far it has come along since the early days.
One of the most obvious trends this year is that social tools themselves are now commonplace in business settings. Most audiences I speak to this day — whether or not they are an Enterprise 2.0 audience — the majority of them indicate that they have ready access to some form of social computing at work. This began to uptick significantly last year but in 2009 all data pointed to a significant inflection point.
Here’s my take on the more significant trends and events in social computing for business this year:
Enterprise 2.0 in 2009
- The capabilities of enterprise-class social tools made major headway. Earlier this year I updated my list of Enterprise 2.0 tools (blogs, wikis, social networks, community platforms, etc.) and was impressed by the number of new entrants in the space, both from startups as well as traditional vendors. The latter have taken many of their traditional document management, ECM, and unified communications platforms and put a Web 2.0 face on them. The result was over 70 different offerings (I have over 25 new ones to add to the list now) that covered a broad spectrum of functionality and capability. What struck me most was that the startups are often improving faster in terms of features and even though they often don’t fully understand the needs of enterprise customers (portal support, integration with DMS/ECM, moderation features, multi-level security) they seem willing to learn. Those working on Enterprise 2.0 initiatives had plenty of good options this year.
- Informal and formal adoption reached about half of global companies in 2009. It could be said that there are lies, damn lies, and then industry surveys, yet the consistency of this year’s data on Enterprise 2.0 adoption was clear: Users are picking up social tools, either the ones they are given or the ones they themselves opt for, and using them in their work. In my The Year of the Shift to Enterprise 2.0 post back in May, which I wrote as the numbers became increasingly clear, I cited Forrester’s statistic that 1 in 2 businesses will use social computing this year as well as a series of additional adoption data points. These included survey stats that said at least 35% of businesses were going to incorporate the use of social networks into their activities and 50% of organizations will use wikis in 2009. These are fascinating numbers but they also represent only partial engagement with many organizations — because B2C engagement and collaboration this year was often represented by early adopters in marketing, sales, and support in my professional estimation — and not deeply transformative social business engagement that impacts the way organizations perform, at least yet.
- Popular new modes of social interaction for the enterprise appeared, particularly microblogging and Google Wave. Social interaction has continued to evolve online, with real-time social aggregators like Friendfeed (since acquired by Facebook) showing the way forward. Twitter has also shown what can be done with interaction in a 140 characters, something that’s compelling for enterprises since it drives efficiency in social interaction and puts to rest fears of time wastage. Thus, Twitter for the enterprise was a popular topic in the first half of the year in particular and I rounded up what the business requirements were and the top tools in the middle of the year. Since then, I find that adoption has been pretty impressive with Yammer getting the broadest penetration globally from what I can see. Google Wave has been the other big discussion in the industry since its announcement in May, and it brings an even more radical vision of collaboration to the table, with real-time persistent social chat combined with two-way data integration from external sources such as feeds, APIs, or your SOA. My early take on Google Wave is that it has an uphill battle on usability, but as a reinvention of social computing for the 21st century it’s a pretty compelling vision.
- Debates continued to rage on about
December 10th, 2009
What will power next-generation businesses?
This is a new Internet-powered business landscape. Self-organizing peer production is the motive force and network effects are the new market share. The ongoing and seemingly inexorable decline of traditional media continues to be the canonical example of what happens when the ground rules get changed in an industry that is fundamentally unable to adapt to new market conditions. A great analysis recently posted by Umair Haque at Harvard Business underscores the point: The so-called new normal is starting to seem more and more foreign the deeper we go into the 21st century than most organizations may yet be willing to believe.
The old question about the innovator’s dilemma has become more urgent as the new business landscape looks increasingly unfamiliar: We now live in an age where things that were historically scarce are now available abundantly — at least on the network — in seemingly unlimited quantities (new ideas, existing knowledge, and productive capacity, never mind that all your customers and competitors are there too), and what was formerly abundant is now scarce (broad demand for big ticket, high margin, low volume products and services in the form of large advertisers, big corporate customers, or anything else.)
Denial is also not just a river in Egypt in this discussion. The reality is that businesses are often very uncomfortable about talking about their future in such an uncertain and rapidly changing landscape. There’s even been serious discussions recently about “putting the genie back into the bottle.” This includes otherwise shrewd business leaders such as Rupert Murdoch suggesting they seriously explore charging for online news in an attempt to roll the clock back on their industry and put pay walls back in place.
Moves like these are desperate measures from shrinking, even dying, industries that are breathtakingly misguided while also being insufficiently imaginative in their response, to put it somewhat mildly. These periodic debates also show us the future of our own corner of the business world and the need for effective vision.
But it’s the monumental misunderstanding of how the network actually functions and creates value that is the more serious error here. This is not to say, however, that the new business models of the Web are completely understood either, or that there’s a straight line of travel that we can take to adopt them. We still have much to learn about how the global economic cornucopia that is the Internet really works and yet the broad outlines are indeed steadily emerging. More specifically, organizations on the front line of this transformation of the business landscape right now actually do have some options today as we’ll see.
Related: Twenty-two power laws for the emerging social economy.
Haque himself has an interesting set of suggestions for the media industry in his Nichepaper Manifesto. It’s a set of perspectives and strategies that every industry will have to adapt to theirs if any part of their business model competes with free. Because, in the Web 2.0 era, free is seemingly equivalent to whatever the network can reliably peer produce, which appears to be almost anything these days.
Are businesses focusing on what really matters?
In an age when traffic and visitor counts seem to be the metric everyone cares about, the crux of the problem seems to be a question of this: The actual item being created by the majority of online businesses today are worth a great deal only in terms of low-value customers. In other words, next generation businesses must scale up dramatically if they are to repeat the value levels of old. These newly emerging business models are thus terrifyingly efficient in comparison — at least from a competitive standpoint — yet the economics don’t seem to make sense at first. If there is a conundrum wrapped in an opportunity here, unraveling this knot is where it lies.
How then do we get across this divide? Clearly, new competencies must be acquired that can respond to today’s market forces: Relentless commodotization of information supply, costs to create outputs collapsing towards zero (at least for knowledge-based inputs), and rampant product abundance dividing demand into countless tiny and seemingly unreachable channels and markets. Social media and user generated content is doing this to media, open source is doing this to the software business as well, crowdsourcing is taking on the rest, and if your business depends on the value of information as a product component in any way, you’re in the firing line too.
An example of how foreign yet novel these new ways of doing business will be: I was studying the story of
November 18th, 2009
Salesforce Chatter: Social operating systems emerge on the IT stage
The next big shift: Intranets, portals, and software suites that are the integrating force of the social fabric for our organizations. This morning’s announcement here at Dreamforce today from Salesforce of Chatter, an enterprise-class realization of Facebook and Twitter, is further evidence of the industry’s push for social Web capabilities for business activities.
Early indications are that Chatter will drive conversation and attention on this subject in enterprise circles very much like Google Wave did for consumer circles (as well as some businesses.)
Of course, a central question is — given current economic challenges for example — whether this is what the enterprise world is really looking for right now. However, as I’ve covered here throughout the year, enterprise social computing has been coming into its own as a significant component of modern business software for a number of reasons lately.
So while adoption numbers vary, it’s an increasingly smart bet that not only are social applications moving into the enterprise, but that existing business applications will begin to get more and more social features.
I often cite Reed’s Law as compelling evidence that social systems have a strong innate tendency to create more value that non-social systems. The message: Social business applications are just a more effective model in general for building business value. However announcements like Chatter begin to make this argument less important. That’s because it’s built right into the Salesforce platform and according to Sam Diaz “will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com.” In other words, the argument is essentially over when social computing becomes baked into the infrastructure of the enterprise.
This will allow the 135,000+ existing apps built on Force.com to have a unified social environment complete with security and one common social graph as well as consistent, shared collaboration features. This is a major step up from the traditional world of non-social business software, all the more so because it’s as much of an infrastructure play as an application play. A comparable response would be to make Microsoft Office more social or perhaps more accurately, the fundamental Google Apps infrastructure. It’s also arguable that the new Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is just such a move (creating an enterprise-wide social environment that’s also an app platform) that’s just not as clearly communicated.
In the end there’s a lot to be said — particularly in the sometimes uncertain realm of enterprise social computing — about having a secure solution that works across your application environment and is easy to integrate into your existing applications and user environments. And while the Salesforce ecosystem is far from a consistent application environment for most enterprises, which are a complex landscape of legacy systems from dozens of vendors, it highlights the next big shift: Intranets, portals, and software suites that are the integrating force of the social fabric for our organizations.
Chatter is a solid example of
November 12th, 2009
Enterprise 2.0: What do we know today about moving our organizations into the 21st century?
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
October 5th, 2009
Twenty-two power laws of the emerging social economy
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
An internationally recognized enterprise architect and business strategist, Dion Hinchcliffe has been working for two decades with leading-edge methods to accelerate project schedules and raise the bar for software quality. You can follow Dion on Twitter.
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