Category: Tagging
July 27th, 2009
Ten top issues in adopting enterprise social computing
Last week ZDNet’s Larry Dignan wrote an insightful post that analyzed the recent report from Charlene Li and the Altimeter Group/Wetpaint about early data that seems to show an intriguing correlation between social media engagement and corporate financial performance. The key finding was this:
To be specific, companies that are both deeply and widely engaged in social media surpass their peers in terms of both revenue and profit performance by a significant difference.
This report (details and copy here) is encouraging news for those embarking on applying social software to various parts of their business. But, as Larry points out, these numbers can be interpreted a number of ways. Many organizations would rather wait for best practices to solidify before climbing very far up the social computing adoption curve. So while there’s increasingly less question that there is genuine ROI in social media, the question still remains whether it can directly drive fundamental, bottom line performance in the average organization today.
This highlights a key conversational thread that came out of last month’s Enterprise 2.0 conference: Does social computing really deliver significantly better business performance? Or is it merely a minor incremental improvement?
Unfortunately, despite an growing body of encouraging case studies, evidence, and research, the jury is still out on total impact social computing will have on businesses. This return will even vary widely for many organizations for a number of reasons will explore below. At present, the uncertainty is simply because that there are not enough organizations that have incorporated social computing approaches (which encompasses the full range of social software as applied to business that include social networks and Enterprise 2.0 to things like crowdsourcing and social CRM) across their lines of business for us to get a complete enough picture. Even the ones that have done it, haven’t done it long enough to see what the results actually are.
Instead, as companies begin pilots and initiatives, we are seeing the first wave of issues cropping up as the larger cultural, IT, and business impact of social tools begins to be felt.
Sidebar: What is social computing? It’s the use of social software within and between organizations and any interested parties such as employees, customers, and partners. Social computing, as explained here, can usher in significant large-scale shifts in where productive forces and innovation come from. Organizations will all adopt enterprise social computing tools in slightly different ways and will generally proceed from ad hoc usage, often by applying widely available consumer tools at first, to more evolved open business models. As of this year, about half of all large organizations now have social computing tools deployed in some manner.
The following is a summary of the issues I’m hearing from practitioners in the field as well as from our clients and industry contacts.
While these ten issues with social computing are the ones I hear about most, your mileage will almost certainly vary. However, I believe them to be representative of where we are in 2009. Please note that these are by no means insurmountable obstacles and merely represent a good cross section of what early adopters typically encounter as they begin climbing the social computing adoption curve (see diagram above).
Ten top issues with social computing in business
- Lack of social media literacy amongst workers. Anecdotally, the farther a business is from the technology industry, the less likely that line workers will be familiar with the latest software innovations. Those who haven’t been maintaining blogs, updating wiki sites, using social networks, sharing information socially, etc. will require more education than those who do. Even the basics of netiquette as well as key techniques to get the most from social computing platforms such as encouraging the building of links between data, tagging information, or establishing weak ties over the network are often poorly understood even by frequent users of social computing tools. In short, social computing requires some literacy efforts in most organizations to achieve effectiveness, just like personal computing skills did a few decades ago.
- A perception that social tools won’t work well in a particular industry. There is often an assumption in many specialized industries — such as medicine or manufacturing, just to cite two random examples — that social tools won’t
May 15th, 2008
Mashups turn into an industry as offerings mature
There were a great many product announcements at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last month, but it was the number of announcements around Web-based mashups in particular that received a large share of attendee and media attention. By my count there were at least nine significant announcements in this space, many around the business flavor of this emerging new type of ad hoc Web applications. These are often referred to as enterprise mashups and the growing number of offerings in this space run the gamut from Web widget assembly platforms for end-users to data-only swizzlers and remixing applications created specifically for IT professionals.
Penetration of mashups in the enterprise is just beginning as their benefits begin to be understood.One thing is now clear in this burgeoning new industry; that there is genuine interest in being a leading provider of enterprise mashup tools as organizations begin getting serious about applying them to make the development of Web-based business solutions faster, more commonplace, and less costly. One significant open question continues to be how long it will take for rapidly evolving mashup techniques to move into enterprises, which have been falling behind developments on the fast-pace of the consumer Web for a number of years now and are just now beginning to make inroads into some businesses.
And its a space that is expected to grow into a serious one in the next five years. A widely covered new report from Forrester estimates, however, that this space is expected to grow into a $700 million a year industry sector by 2013, or about 1% of the entire software industry, depending on how you define mashups and which types of tools are included.
For awareness and understanding of the fast-growing world of mashups are significant challenges as IT practitioners, business strategists, and software vendors attempt to grapple with what’s facing up to be the biggest challenge of all: The habits and expectations of the larger part of a generation of workers who don’t yet realize mashups are poised to change many things about the software landscape on the Web and in the workplace. Generational changes can be difficult for businesses to embrace successfully, and while evidence that mashups are remaking the business world are still very much emerging, they certainly hold the promise.
Figure 1: Mashup Tools and Platforms Circa 2008
However, the continued proliferation of high quality Web parts and open APIs, especially in the last couple of years, has offered compelling sourcing options for enterprise mashups is the making the expanding Global SOA compelling as local IT resources for building and improving business solutions. Combined with the consumer Web’s intensive focus on ease-of-use to gain adoption, and this has paved the road for low barrier, low cost effective assembly of software mashups instead of the time consuming and expensive design and coding of largely new applications. In this sense, mashups are probably the next major new application development model as well an increasingly popular approach for achieving better ROI with service-oriented architecture (SOA).
Mashup Standards Emerge: Read how a number of new mashup standards have appeared recently.
But while the life of the average Web developer has been greatly improved by the
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 »
July 26th, 2007
A checkpoint on Web 2.0 in the enterprise
For well over a year now we’ve seen reports and announcements from a major industry analyst firms and others tracking the movement of Web 2.0 ideas into the enterprise. Gartner, Forrester, McKinsey, and many others have all weighed in on the trends or made recommendations, sometimes cautious and sometimes optimistic, that organizations should start heading down the Web 2.0 path. And public interest in Web 2.0 in the enterprise is widespread too, not in the least exemplified by the fact that Web 2.0 trends of all kinds — business and consumer both — are tracked closely here in many blogs on ZDNet.
This reflects the fact that the majority of productive power is on the edge of our networks and always has been.We’ve also seen that the term itself has moved from passing familiarity in the leading edge of the technical community to nearly universal recognition in both IT and mainstream business circles. That Web 2.0 is a complex topic there is little doubt since it’s often described as a grab bag category of the latest ideas and movements that include — but are by no means limited to– wikis, blogs, RSS, podcasting, content tagging, mashups, and social networking.
The big question? What do you really need to know today about Web 2.0 in the enterprise?
Reducing all of these ideas into an underlying set of principles is what people like Tim O’Reilly have been doing for several years now. It’s generally understood by most people that the Internet has changed considerably in the last half-decade and that those changes have reached a tipping point that’s enabling brand new business models, unleashing a wave of innovative products, influencing public behavior on a large scale, and in particular, resulting in entirely new types of online businesses. But as I discussed in last year’s discussion on Web 2.0 reductionism, trying to get at the core motive force behind things as disparate as rich user experiences and collective intelligence is no small task.
Fortunately, we are indeed as an industry starting to get a handle on how all the pieces of Web 2.0 fit together. For instance, it’s now clear that having hundreds of millions of people globally connected together pervasively via one single high speed two-way network (aka the Internet) will result in many of the things we’re now seeing in the marketplace. It seems a fundamental new widespread focus on leveraging that two-way aspect of the network deeply in our online products, as well as increasingly playing to the fundamental strengths of the network that is the Web, is teaching us invaluable lesson after invaluable new lesson for our businesses. The result is that the living laboratory of the Web is now the source of the greater part of our innovation in business these days. Today’s World Wide Web is a larger ecosystem and with far more brainpower and activity that any single organization could ever hope to match.
Web 2.0 Transforms The Business Landscape
The story of Web 2.0 began with things like open source software, which is nothing more than entire products created ad hoc by volunteer armies of contributors that now outnumber — by virtue of the sheer capacity the network — the world of commercial software efforts. It’s not lost on careful watchers that open source software tends to be more feature rich, secure, and bug free that commercial software, despite being created by thousands of loosely coupled, self-selected contributors. Since then, this idea of commons-based peer production of products on the global Internet has spread through just about every other type of product that can be delivered over the Web from marketing, advertising, collaboration, news, customer service to banking, investment, fund raising, disaster management, and dozens of other types of business and civic activities. This reflects the fact that the majority of productive power is on the edge of our networks and always has been. We’ve tinkered for a couple of decades to build good networked software that took advantage of this fact but we didn’t yet have enough knowledge of the best techniques for creating them. That things like peer production are now moving to the center of the design of online products finally shows a maturing realization that our older, more traditional views of networked applications were just not effective as they could be.
Combine the rise of peer production with the Web growing up into a true software platform as part of the rise of rich user experiences and SaaS. Then witness the movement of the Web out into the world in the last few years and exploding into thousands of types of new Internet devices, mobile and otherwise, that deliver — and just as importantly if not more — capture value in every corner of the globe and in every conceivable setting.
An overarching and compelling new business vision
And while there more trends beyond these that are driving Web 2.0, the upshot is that the productive capacity of the world is increasingly wired into the Web and can be leveraged by building online products that encourage the close cooperation and involvement of those at the edge of the network. You can get now people on the Web en masse to build innovative software applications or help you accumulate vast and almost infinitely rich databases of information and even foster enormous online populations for which you are the preferred intermediary and of which you can tap the combined intelligence.
It’s this more comprehensive and integrated vision of Web 2.0 and its ingredients consisting of Read the rest of this entry »
May 5th, 2007
Enterprise 2.0 as a corporate culture catalyst
I've only recently had a chance to catch up and read Tom Davenport's post a few weeks ago about his skepticism of Enterprise 2.0's ability to wreak significant cultural and hierarchical change inside organizations. Those of you tracking the Enterprise 2.0 story know the drill, namely that applying Web 2.0 tools and platforms inside organization may or may not — depending on who you are talking to — improve the way we collaborate, run our businesses, and even potentially tap major new veins of previously unexploitable worker productivity. I myself tend to be a bit biased because I'm very close to many uses of these technologies and their use in the field. And that's shown me that if one trend stands out clearly above the fray, it's that most organizations are rapidly embracing these tools today, either from the top-down or at a grassroots level, and often both.
Viewpoints like Tom are entirely right on however if we were looking at tools that are hard to use, highly complex and overspecialized, and required significant resources and special skills to acquire, deploy, and maintain. But this is entirely not the case in this wave of software applications that seem to systematically address virtually all the barriers we've seen in the past to getting new tools adopted, rapidly providing immediate value, and broadly used. One of the most important reasons for this is simply that the constantly evolving Web has continually refined and guided through competitive pressure — and other feedback loops — the design of sites until we have hit upon very effective models for collaboration and communication. These include the now-ubiquitous blog and wiki but many others as well including mashups, roaming Web desktops, and highly-customizable SaaS apps. Applying these to the enterprise is now extremely easy for anyone to do, highly applicable in many if not most business situations, and certainly last but not least, very inexpensive.
But as Tom goes on to note, the real obstacles to applying Web 2.0 platforms inside our workplaces may very well be our corporate cultures. Cultural impedance is something that's also inhibited many otherwise highly useful and potentially beneficial IT initiatives including SOA, BPM, EAI and others. The gap between what's technically possible and what the corporate culture is willing and able to accept — must less actively encourage — is often wider than many people automatically assume. Clearly the exciting things happening on the Web today from the explosion of user-generated content, ad hoc collaboration in the large, rapid self-service global information discovery via Web search, and collective intelligence stories like Wikipedia are outcomes that many would like to replicate inside our enterprises.
And the very openness of Web 2.0 platforms, the control and power that must be handed to
January 29th, 2007
Big software firms take aim at Web 2.0
While 2006 was a big year for Web 2.0 in the consumer space, it was barely on the radar in the enterprise world. That didn't stop volumes of press coverage, speculation, and debate about how applicable Web 2.0 technologies — from Ajax to social networking — would actually be to the business world.
However those in the enterprise who wanted to go ahead, experiment, and conduct pilot projects to see how Web 2.0 concepts work for them were largely stuck with very consumer-oriented Web 2.0 applications to try out. That's because until recently, the major software makers that supply the application platforms that run the vast majority of the business world haven't had applications that specifically focused on Web 2.0 patterns and practices, things like social networking, tagging, mashups, architectures of participation, and so on.
The consumerization of the enterprise was predicted to be one of the significant trends of 2007 and a quick look at this list of applications confirms that it will indeed be a key story this year.However, in the last couple of months quite a different picture has emerged and the world's largest software companies have taken clear aim at the Web 2.0 product space with announcement after announcement. IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and Intel all have significant products, often many of them, targeted at offering the modern consumer Web experience to workers inside the firewall. And far from being a me-too play with the rest of the industry, the truth is that as popular as open source is getting — particularly in the Web 2.0 community — many business customers still prefer solutions that play well with the mountains of enterprise IT applications and back-end systems that currently run the business.
And with approaches like Enterprise 2.0 heating up including the cutting edge topics like the emergence of mashup creation tools to build a visual "face" of service-oriented architectures (SOA), it turns out that Web 2.0 applications aimed at the enterprise must deal well with formal services integration, enterprise search, information security, single sign-on, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, and a laundry list of other enterprise issues. These are all topics that the aforementioned firms understand well and are actively addressing in most cases with these new products.
Adding "enterprise context" to Web 2.0 tools require some work but doesn't have to be daunting. Read overviews of how to provide this for blogs and wikis.
It's also true that these are uncertain days for many of the big software firms. This is partially because the world of software is becoming increasingly commoditized while the expectations for how software should be hosted is also moving rapidly from installed native applications to online Software as a Service (SaaS). There's also a sense that enterprise systems have become too complicated, unwieldy, and slow-moving compared to their nimble brethren out on the Web. New Web applications have continued to adapt and evolve out on the Internet quite quickly in comparison to traditional IT, essentially ushering in the Web 2.0 era itself. It was no accident that the Web 2.0 Summit's theme last year was disruption and opportunity, and so it's concomitant on software companies to adjust to the industry and evolve.
The Web 2.0 strategies of these new applications are as interesting and varied as the companies that have come up with them. It's worth taking a look at the big Web 2.0 enterprise apps being announced so far. To get a good feel for the this next generation of enterprise apps, here's a round-up of the latest Web 2.0 software plans of the industry's top software firms. In no particular order:
SAP announced last week that it would be adding Web 2.0-style collaboration capabilities in many of its projects. While SAP's specific Web 2.0 plans are the least defined of all the companies in this, a couple of notable points are the specific implementation of widgets, small bits of mobile code that can be added to a Web page by a user and provide data or functionality from back-end systems. The emergence of end-user widgets on the Web was one of the more interesting
December 19th, 2006
Enterprise 2.0 year in review
Though the eponymous title of this blog refers to the application of all aspects of Web 2.0 to the enterprise both large and small, the big story this year has really been about a collaborative subset of Web 2.0, something referred to as Enterprise 2.0. Though the definition has continued to expand in some circles, Enterprise 2.0 describes the use of the latest freeform, emergent, social software tools that hold the promise to significantly improve the ways that we work together and collaborate. As an example, the liberal use of internal blogs and wikis with discoverable content frequently forms the foundation of an Enterprise 2.0 software strategy.
Readers of this blog will be familiar with my coverage of Enterprise 2.0 throughout 2006 and by all indications 2007 is very likely the year that it will significantly break out into the enterprise. CIOs, and more importantly, technology savvy workers are increasingly applying Enterprise 2.0 within their organizations because it can often be adopted very inexpensively, is by its intrinsic nature easy to use (requiring little if any end-user training), and many believe that it can be applied incrementally. This makes Enterprise 2.0 IT-friendly on numerous fronts to deploy by already harried, budget-pressured IT departments that are eager to deliver some low-risk wins. And informal data does suggest that many organizations will indeed be trying next year to get at the promise of productivity that Enterprise 2.0 tools offers.
Read my original write-up that describes the key differences between Enterprise 2.0 apps and traditional enterprise apps. Includes the link to Andrew McAfee's original MIT Sloan Management Review article describing Enterprise 2.0.
But the whole story is not entirely as rosy as all that and there have been concerns raised around Enterprise 2.0 technologies including, but by no means limited to: the fears of a loss of control of communication within organizations; worries over the "dumbing down" of corporate conversation; the available means of determining the accuracy of information captured and shared by employees using Enterprise 2.0 tools, and even concerns over productivity, which usually boils down to whether users will spend their time socializing on non-work related topics. With some of these questions unanswered, the more risk averse are taking a wait and see attitude on Enterprise 2.0.
However, in print and in the blogosphere, Enterprise 2.0 has been getting considerable attention including a small but quickly growing set of software products that have self-identified themselves as Enterprise 2.0. There is even the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston in mid-year and O'Reilly's new Web 2.0 Best Practices document, probably the leading and most rigorous description of Web 2.0, now heavily references Enterprise 2.0 throughout. As you can see from the
October 25th, 2006
Nine ideas for IT managers considering Enterprise 2.0
As browser-based software, SaaS, and Web 2.0 continue to make some inroads in the enterprise, it's the lack of useful pioneer reports that hampers the early adoptors. Sure, many of us witness the often amazing trends taking place out on the Web in the form of mountains of user generated content and communication and collaboration occuring en masse via blogs and spaces. But the big question is still with us: Can the motivations and context that makes the latest generation of software on the Web so compelling, and hence popular, be made just as meaningful in the enterprise?
As we get deeper into the second decade of the Web, we've been inundated with the 2.0 generation of everything, hopefully all learning from the mistakes of the 1.0 generation. In addition to Web 2.0 itself however, we have two more important enterprise software trends: Office 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, coined by Ismael Ghalimi and Andrew McAfee respectively. Office 2.0 represents the increasing use of browser-based software in the office, while Enterprise 2.0 is more Web 2.0-ish in that it specifically describes the use of freeform, emergent, social software to conduct collaboration and share knowledge.
For its part, Office 2.0 represents freedom from the tyranny of installing software and updates, remembering where you keep your data and your programs (it's all in the cloud with Office 2.0), and dealing with pesky things like admin rights, software versions, virus scanning, and more. Though browser-based software still has its limitations (like what happens when the server is down or you don't have a connection), it's increasingly clear that the network is going to become the pre-eminent location for most meaningful business software, if it hasn't happened already.
Enterprise 2.0 is more problematic in that it directly addresses the known weaknesses of existing IT models and platforms for helping people work together. Specifically this means the fact that corporate information tends to be non-shared by default, that the easiest productivity tools to use are the ones that have very little collaboration built-in, and that the information that does exist is often impossible to find and is often structured in some formal, centrally controlled way. Enterprise 2.0 takes on existing ingrained habits and behaviors, and recommends a carefully thought out but ultimately comprehensive change in the way we normally work together. Specifically, this means being more
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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If Linux is going to power your mission-critical applications, you'd better have the best support known to business. Novell was rated the top provider of Linux technical support.
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The Business Essentials Guide provides you useful tools and templates to help grow your business and save you time with automated shipping solutions.
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