Category: Hype
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
July 29th, 2009
Assessing the Enterprise 2.0 marketplace in 2009: Robust and crowded
Social software platforms, including services such as Facebook and Twitter, have become one of the primary channels for communication amongst consumers this year, even eclipsing e-mail in some parts of the developed world.
It was companies that either open sourced eventually or took open source and then made it enterprise class that often scored the best.The same however, can’t quite be said yet for the workplace. While the adoption numbers for social applications are still impressive in business (about half of all large organizations), actual adoption and use is lagging significantly behind the non-business world as organizations take the time to assess a range of issues with enterprise social computing, including appropriateness, security, control, management methods, and roll-out strategies.
However, given the widespread interest and popularity in social tools these days, it’s becoming a pretty safe bet that you’ll be seeing them in some form on a workplace intranet near you. The question is in what form? The choices of social tools these days can be daunting and are only increasing rapidly, with new entries appearing weekly and existing ones being upgraded often. What’s increasingly needed is a detailed look at what’s currently available in business-class social software and how it sizes up, which we’ll try to do in high-level form here.
As we’ll see, since last year’s marketplace map, there has been a veritable explosion in social applications that are intended for use in business settings, both internally or externally. These offerings have a surprisingly wide range of features and so in this post I will explore one of the broadest and most important categories of business social software, Enterprise 2.0, in detail. I’ve also included a pretty comprehensive map of the marketplace for 2009 as defined by the products that are available today (or are highly anticipated and soon to be released, such as Google Wave.)
Enterprise 2.0 software: Choice abounds
A wide range of software providers now proclaim that they make Enterprise 2.0 tools, or have adapted/extended what they make today in order to address this space in some way. This includes the full gamut of open source projects, commercial vendors, startups, and established Web firms such as Google.
In fact, during the course of the survey work, it sometimes seemed like every company making business-oriented collaboration and communication tools is now offering Enterprise 2.0 capabilities in some form. Overall this is a good sign for customers (because supply is most likely greater than demand) and though all new markets tend to shake out, we are no longer in early days with social software. This means that the majority of these products will likely be around for the medium to long-term. It also means that there is probably something available that will fit your specific choice of features, price, technology needs, standards support, and other requirements.
Click To View In Detail
The visual above can be clicked to view the gallery containing the full list of Enterprise 2.0-capable applications assessed in this survey.
There are over 70 major products on this list — many of them entire software platforms in their own right — with a wide range of Web 2.0 capabilities including blogs, wikis, forums, community, social networks, and social messaging. Every attempt was made to be inclusive while still adhering to the spirit of “emergent, freeform, social collaboration” tools. Also, a product had to be compelling and capable in order to appear on this list at all; all of the offerings that made the cut are solid products in my opinion. Literally hundreds of candidates did not make the cut.
Further Reading: The enterprise microblogging marketplace for mid-2009.
So, for example, a simple but popular microblogging tool like Yammer appears on the list along with the widely used, feature-laden Microsoft SharePoint suite. It’s important to note that these are very different applications in terms of
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
June 8th, 2009
Reconciling social computing with the enterprise
Umair Haque wrote an impressive tract on his Harvard Business blog late last week about Twitter and how it changes the rules of innovation. It’s an incisive and challenging piece that well worth reading if your looking at cutting-edge business trends. It also helps surface what’s turning into an increasingly larger gap between what happens in the business world and what happens everywhere else.
It will sometimes be a challenge to find the right metrics that help you to drive decisions about your social computing behaviors that improve the business. Jeff Jarvis and Michael Arrington made similar points over the weekend about process vs. product, ostensibly about their particular industry (journalism) and how social processes are competing — often more effectively, though very differently — with traditional, non-social “product” creations, namely news stories. As we’ll see, you can find similar examples of this now in many other industries. The key point: The processes involved in how we accomplish our daily work are being transformed by social tools on the network. Along the way, the act of work itself is becoming more of a collective journey instead of a final destination as our individual work experiences become more open, collaborative, participatory, and social.
The net result is often better and richer outcomes, though the journey can occasionally devolve into a less-than-deterministic result that can be (for the time being) rather unsatisfying, though rarely does it come to a complete stop until everyone who wants to has a crack at it.
On the other hand, the classical way of working has been to create finished, perfect-as-possible outcomes (products, services, etc.) from opaque, unknowable, lengthy processes which outsiders, within or outside the organization, could not directly perceive, alter, or improve. As Jarvis writes of traditional work methods:
It is the byproduct of the means and requirements of mass production: If you have just one chance to put out a product and it has to serve everyone the same, you come to believe it’s perfect because it has to be, whether that product is a car (we are the experts, we took six years to tool up, it damned well better be perfect) or government (where, I’m learning, employees have a phobic fear of mistakes - because citizens and journalists will jump on them) or newspapers (we package the world each day in a box with a bow on it - you’re welcome).
The key point here is the broader changes we are experiencing today: The pervasive presence of social software and today’s highly open, interactive, and remixable Web embedded deeply into our personal lives is increasingly allowing us to experience a new way of living. And it’s one that bears less and less resemblance to the workplace all the time, with significantly differing behaviors, skills, tools, and expectations. This situation creates a delta that, sooner or later, will simply become untenable for many organizations. We simply aren’t keeping up with the pace of change, never mind that not all workers are experiencing the change of the modern world the same way or at the same speed. Media sharing sites, social networks, and social tools have become embedded deeply in a large percentage of people’s lives, just as long as we remember it’s not everyone.
This increasing distance between these two worlds creates a gap — a disconnect, even — that increasingly cuts organizations off from their most valuable assets (their people) and also exerts a subversive force on organizations as their workers help themselves to the tools of their own volition, bring their (and arguably better) new behaviors and processes to work, and try to get things done with them, whether that’s crowdsourcing, Enterprise 2.0, online customer communities, etc.
So what will happen? Will there just continue to be a growing chasm between the worlds of business and how we do things outside of work? Or will the gap just become too large to sustain, with an equilibrium shift suddenly taking place in some way that creates what I’ll call (for want of a better term), a social singularity.
Singularities are popular topics with tech audiences. Read about technology singularities and Internet singularities.
A social singularity would be embodied by a convergence of
January 29th, 2009
Using Web 2.0 to reinvent your business for the economic downturn
We are very fortunate that, given the generational challenges we face today, we have tools that those that came before us could not possibly imagine.At this point it’s more than clear that 2009 will be a challenging year for a great many businesses. Most organizations these days are now actively engaged in activities that are taking a look at what they can do to make the best of the current economic situation.
Some business leaders will be looking at paring things back to the basics 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. Many of the more transformational aspects of the 2.0 era now have extensive groundwork laid for them, are available in genuinely enterprise-ready solutions/pilots, and many have just been waiting for the right situation; the driving need for businesses to change and transform in the face of radically different business conditions.
Why is Web 2.0 particularly interesting right now for the enterprise? Web 2.0 has always been about making the most of the intrinsic power of the network and whatever is attached to it. This can be people (social computing and Enterprise 2.0), low-cost dynamic Web partners (open APIs and cloud computing), the world’s largest database of information, lightweight integration (mashups and Web-style SOA), or maximizing the value of the network itself (the network effects that everyone talks about), and much more. These collectively represent better, more efficient, and less expensive ways to accomplish things that we previously used to do without the network’s help or with methods that didn’t take advantages of how the network works.
Read this year’s Enterprise Web 2.0 predictions for 2009 for more perspective on this topic.
Fortunately, our businesses have become so thoroughly network connected that the inherent efficiency of most 2.0 approaches will now work just as well inside the firewall as outside, though there still remain a few differences.
So what does this mean to the harried businesses looking for new approaches to creating value in a chaotic and unpredictable time? How can this help in cutting costs or driving growth? Here are some practical ways that 2.0 approaches can help organizations grapple with the challenges of 2009. Though some of these have an IT slant, many of them are strategic approaches to Web 2.0 that most organizations can embrace across their lines of business to capture substantially better outcomes.
Note that the struggle with many of these, as with so much of Web 2.0, is that there is a major shift in control, a much higher level of transparency, and an openness that many businesses can be uncomfortable with. However, to organizations that are willing to overcome these largely political, cultural, and mindset challenges, significant opportunities are available for the taking, often for relatively modest investment.
Strategic use of Web 2.0 for growth and resilience
As always, this is not an exhaustive list, though it’s a good start, and only gives a sense of the possibilities. I pointedly left out important areas like mobile, despite prognostications like mine or others lately that it’s a hot subject; it is, it’s just not fundamentally transformative enough at this point. I am sure readers will contribute more below in TalkBack.
- Move to lower-cost online/SaaS versions of enterprise applications. - Face it, paying for yearly upgrades and new license fees is a major, recurring budget line item most organizations would like to eliminate now that most companies have a computer in front of every worker. Open source software is an option and is certainly cheaper up front, until the support costs and other factors come in. There are, in fact, numerous lower-cost options today for virtually any type of business software but unless it’s browser-delivered, or even better, externally hosted as SaaS, you can’t use the provider’s economies of scale to drive down the full range of costs from deployment of upgrades and technical support to hosting, backups, and management. In general, moving to SaaS for anything that isn’t strategic to the business is the best place to start if you’re trying out externally hosted apps for the first time.
Strategic applications might be more difficult to migrate to a SaaS model both from a customization and change management standpoint as well as from concerns about governance, reliability, compliance, and regulation. Retraining and data migration are a cost component in SaaS scenarios but are manageable in today’s increasingly online and data standardized world. How much will you actually save? The numbers vary, but recent reports say that moving to a SaaS version of your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system will save the average firm
April 22nd, 2008
Enterprise 2.0 industry matures as businesses grapple with its potential
Some of the big IT news over the weekend was the announcement that Forrester predicts that the Enterprise 2.0 space will be a $4.6 billion industry within 5 years. ZDNet’s Larry Dignan had the full breakdown yesterday on Forresters bullish outlook while Dennis Howlett immediately took umbrage with Forrester’s conception of the Enterprise 2.0 marketplace using a “loose definition and one that could be applied to any number of technology components from CRM through to supply chain management and pretty much anything between.”
Certainly that’s the challenge of pinning down something with a term that still doesn’t have industry consensus after two years, yet seems destined to be a vitally important space that our businesses are going to be moving to over the next few years. Enterprise 2.0 itself was originally defined by Harvard’s Andrew McAfee a couple of years ago in careful detail (early timeline) about something he called freeform, social, emergent software applications (such as blogs, wikis, but many others as well.) The enterprise software industry began carrying the banner ever since, applying Enterprise 2.0 to the next generation of countless marketplace offerings, often whether or not they were any of the things that seemed to make this new type of application unique and special.
Read The State of Enterprise 2.0, a thorough summary of this new software space.
The intent of creating this new term, however, was to capture a very significant change in the way that people use networked software, regardless of it was the genuine retooling of “big box” traditional IT software suites or the infiltration of subversive Web 2.0-style consumer applications across the firewall. Careful market segmentation for research tracking purposes and the debate over the inclusion of traditional, top-down IT systems into the definition of Enterprise 2.0 can be interesting exercises. But such efforts also miss the big picture and the long-term potential of this potentially potent new generation of enterprise software applications.
In my studies of Enterprise 2.0 adoption, there are two major methods by which these new applications take hold. The first is the traditional model where the IT department or some part of the business decides at a high level to adopt these new tools and begins the process of evaluation, acquisition, deployment, training and adoption. This is the traditional model that most IT large-scale software acquisitions still use today.
The other model is where individuals take it upon themselves to find the best solutions to a given problem at hand and solve them creatively and collaboratively at a grassroots level. This is becoming increasingly more common, particularly in organizations that are less strongly hierarchical and I’ve identified this story in many large organizations, from AOL’s stunningly rapid viral adoption of MediaWiki (the open source platform that runs Wikipedia) to the story of a large utility company getting ready to roll out Enterprise 2.0 only to find that the majority of departments had already adopted a solution on their own.
This second form of adoption is one of the hallmarks of this new model for using software to solve business problems and it speaks volumes to how different they are from the previous generation of applications. So it’s worth spending a little time understanding exactly why and how they are so different. To explain this, I often refer to Read the rest of this entry »
January 3rd, 2008
12 predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2008
The worlds of SOA, SaaS, and Web 2.0 have been swirling around each other for a couple of years now and in 2008 we’ll finally see these gel into a practical, modern vision of next generation enterprises. And a variety of forces are coming together to make 2008 the year that enterprises refit themselves for the 21st century.
The driving forces for change this year will be the aging of existing IT systems, the rise of up-and-coming new approaches such as highly capable new Web-based applications, mashups, collective intelligence powered business software, Web-oriented architectures, and last but certainly not least, social software. These are providing the raw materials to use upon the freshly cleared canvases many organizations are readying for themselves as many organizations begin to retool and upgrade. Even the IT foundations we’ve come to get so used to, such as the operating systems we’ve used for years, have recently evolved and not always in the direction we’re going. If nothing else, the ever-advancing computing environments of the workplace and the Web are encouraging us to move to newer and better models out of sheer momentum.
But the changes we’ll see happening in our organizations won’t just be ones that are imposed by necessity, many of them will be driven from the bottom up as we see more and more grassroots IT solutions sprouting up from the trenches of Web-savvy workers, while many existing initiatives, including traditional SOA efforts, intranets and portals, CRM, decision management, and many others get recast and sometimes entirely reinvented using the lessons we’ve learned from the Web 2.0 era over the last two years, with the leading factors being the large scale shift of control to users, lightweight new application types proven in efficacy and scale on the Web, and social computing with Web technologies.
1. SOA finally goes pragmatic, Web-oriented, and lightweight. We’ve heard this prediction before but in 2008 it will be one of the items front and center for IT departments for a variety of reasons. Many of the ponderous, heavyweight SOA initiatives still in existence will finally refactor their design principles and then their architectures to be much more lightweight and RESTful. The classic SOA principles will still apply but changes in how they are realized inside organizations will just reach the tipping point in 2008. One key driver is that organizations are increasingly tired of waiting for ROI on their SOA investments and the demand for change is pushing IT leaders to search for new, more effective approaches. Web-orientation has enabled SOA on the greater Web on a vast scale and gained credence for a critical mass of the SOA community.
Read about ongoing story of Web 2.0 and SOA convergence, which will be well under way by the end of 2008.
The bottom line: If a Web service/open API can’t be consumed in the browser, it will find itself relegated to the deep end of the back office, if not retired outright. That’s not to say that the infrastructure for SOAs is getting simplier or that browser consumption is the ultimate litmus test, it’s not. And as we’ll see below, high velocity, large scale governance will be required to get any use out of these new highly distributable models for projecting content and functionality to any point in the enterprise.
Pervasive syndication for enterprise data, particularly with ATOM and sometimes two way, will also be a bright spot this year but will remain a largely emerging story until 2009.
2. Enterprise search will remain broken or highly limited in most organizations. I’ve covered previously the many reasons why search can’t work in the typical enterprise without enormous effort and consequently this won’t be fixed for most organizations this year. However, good enterprise search is necessary to leverage the fast growing and woefully under-leveraged information warehoused in the vast acreages of most enterprise data centers. Workers are still left with literally no choice but to pull their information from the Web or sequentially rummage through various silos to piece together what they need instead of putting a few keywords in an enterprise search engine and scanning the results. The unfortunate news: The penetration of local search engines into enterprise data will only improve a handful of percentage points this year.
3. Security will become a major concern as Web 2.0 apps and SaaS make the edge of enterprises increasingly porous. In 2008 users will self-provision themselves with consumer Web applications across the firewall, more and more business information will be found out in the open in enterprise wikis, workers will spend more time in public social networking sites, and the very pliability of mashup-based applications will make it unclear where data comes from and where it’s going. This will make security around next generation platforms become a Read the rest of this entry »
December 27th, 2007
The top Enterprise Web 2.0 stories of 2007
Over the last year, we have witnessed the continuation of the steady movement of the mostly consumer-driven Web 2.0 phenomenon into the workplace that began as a trickle in 2006. Blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, social networking, end-user mashups, and even prediction markets saw their largest entry yet into businesses and institutions around the world. The platform wars may start to return in 2008 as Web 2.0 ideas taught companies how to turn an open platform into competitive advantage.The more technical side of Web 2.0 also began to see maturity as businesses started to rethink their service-oriented architectures to be more Web-like and the rich Internet application industry added many major new building blocks and platforms that push the envelope in terms of the kinds of interactive experiences the Web is able to deliver.
Last year’s Enterprise Web 2.0 watch phrase of “consumerization of the enterprise” was clearly evident in workplaces large and small this year, yet we also saw significant new shifts in the way we look at online platforms of all kinds to communicate, collaborate, be more productive, and innovate. You may recall that the Web 2.0 mantra of 2004-2006 was often focused on emergent uses of networks to harness collective intelligence and provide next generation user experiences on the Web. And like each successive generation of innovation on the Web and elsewhere, most early attempts to capitalize on these powerful new ideas were relatively unsuccessful, though the success stories (which resulted in half of the top 8 sites in the world at the moment) resulted in both superior products for the Web community to use and useful new techniques we could use to improve our own results.
In 2007, we also witnessed a new pragmatism as the Web 2.0 hype began to die down, the success stories emerged, and the non-so-successful continued to inform the industry with the lessons needed to navigate the rocky shoals of product development on the Web today. We also began to see Enterprise 2.0 make real penetration in business as well as social networking finally get some corporate respect and validation as a functional business tool that can bring tangible benefits to the workplace.
Read here for a recap on what Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are generally defined as.
2007 was also a year of innovation in the mobile Web space. The iPhone proved that mobile Web devices were still capable of near quantum leaps in improvement and innovation, Twitter demonstrated what was possible in the realm of truly network-oriented social software on mobile devices, and Google dramatically improved their mobile Web applications with innovative capabilities throughout the year, particularly with Google Maps Mobile. However, while the iPhone isn’t quite ready for enterprise use yet (though it will likely get their soon), both Twitter and Google Maps Mobile have become poster children for mobile consumer apps that have had successful cross-over to the business world as enormously useful tools in day to day work.
But a contrarian might say Read the rest of this entry »
August 27th, 2007
A checkpoint on Web 2.0 in the enterprise, Part 2
A new survey of the personal use of Web 2.0 applications by CIOs emerged late last week and provided another interesting, if high-level, datapoint about the future of Web 2.0 in the enterprise. Carried out by CIO Insight, the survey reported the usual trends like high rates of use of wikis, blogs, and RSS, as well as a few unexpected outliers, like 39% of CIOs listen to podcasts.
More than one large company has discovered that external customer communities provide better support to their own customers.Like most surveys, however, the questions tend to be leading and prevent unpredicted trends emerge naturally. Consequently, the numbers in this survey look somewhat different from the larger, more intention-based results from McKinsey’s global Web 2.0 survey earlier this year.
In terms of current trends, Silicon Valley proper has for the most part become thoroughly bored with the Web 2.0 meme despite the largely superficial presence of the most powerful Web 2.0 concepts in many online products and services.
At the same time, mainstream business is just now getting ready for Web 2.0 adoption and are beginning to incorporate the underlying technologies, platforms, and concepts into their IT departments and lines of business, though they too are often focusing on the low hanging fruit. But pilot projects now abound in businesses large and small around the world and even some concerted large-scale Web 2.0 projects and Enterprise 2.0 rollouts are under way in leading-edge organizations. Business and IT leaders on the sidelines continue to seek early results and evidence of what works and what doesn’t when it comes to applying Web 2.0 to their respective situations.
Surveys do help paint a picture of what’s taking place in the large marketplace and, judiciously used, can help us make better decisions. Unfortunately, most of the current crop of Web 2.0 surveys appear to be focused on specific technologies and applications of Web 2.0 instead of the deeper and more disruptive business models and approaches.
For example, crowdsourcing is just one example of how to use the fundamental power of the global Web to change the size, scope, and even the very nature of an organization’s productive output. Yet crowdsourcing hasn’t made the cut in any of the Web 2.0 surveys I’ve come across so far despite its proven game-changing potential.
A fairly well known story, crowdsourcing in the large in its earliest form has already shown that it can disrupt an entire, established industry. I’m talking about the rise of open source software, one of the early and effective proofs that crowdsourcing could be applied to a tricky business problem — creating competitive software cheaply by using virtually free labor capacity on the Internet — resulted in a nearly unending stream of high-quality, innovative products in the form of application software, databases, and even entire operating systems.
The crowdsourcing link above takes you to Wikipedia and will list many innovative examples of how organizations are taking it beyond software creation and enabling large communities of people on the Internet to generate outcomes that are often impossible in any other way. This is one of the more dramatic and powerfully business models that Web 2.0 makes possible when one tries to harness collective intelligence, one of the core ideas of Web 2.0 and probably the one most rife with long term implications for business and society. Yet only the McKinsey survey above cited this prospect in any recognizable way in its survey.
The point I’m making here is that Read the rest of this entry »
April 3rd, 2007
More results on use of Web 2.0 in business emerge
The last few weeks have seen a series of interesting new reports, studies, and papers on the past, present, and future of Web 2.0 concepts and applications as applied to businesses. Most notable for many industry watchers have been fairly rigorous new works by McKinsey & Company as well as Forrester, whom have each released the results of broad surveys of executives in various industries. The focus of both surveys was to capture a picture of the interests, activities, motivators for Web 2.0 adoption of several thousand C-level executives in medium to large companies.
While both the McKinsey study and Forrester report have summaries online — and you can read a detailed breakdown of the fascinating adoption numbers in Nick Carr's excellent roll-up of many of the key numbers in the reports — what stands out clearly from the state of Web 2.0 in business last year is the almost surprisingly high levels interest in some of the more advanced, and powerful, concepts in the Web 2.0 practice set.
Gartner, for its part, had its own take on things last year with their widely covered hype cycle report on Web 2.0, indicating the things like collective intelligence (ostensibly the core principle of Web 2.0) would be a long term, transformational business strategy that they felt at the time would take at least 5 to 10 years for broad industry uptake. However, the report from McKinsey intriguing suggests something much different may be taking place.
The numbers McKinsey provides from actual business leaders seems to indicate that broad, active interest in collective intelligence is rapidly forming in the offices of many company's CIOs, CTOs, and other executives. McKinsey cites that fully 48% of the nearly 3,000 leading executives surveyed are actively investing in collective intelligence approaches. What makes this interesting is that this number is a good bit more than executives are currently reporting that they are investing in other well known Web 2.0 approaches including social networking, RSS, podcasting, and even wikis and blogs, which come in about 1/3 lower in overall interest. In fact, out of all the Web 2.0 trends surveyed, only Web services has a bigger footprint than collective intelligence in terms of current investment. This strongly suggests some kind of sea change in business thinking since last year.
This is a fascinating outcome since
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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