November 12th, 2009

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

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 4:18 am

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

Tags: Social Computing, Enterprise 2.0, Dion Hinchcliffe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where is Enterprise 2.0 headed?

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

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

  

• There is still lots of debate about how to

Read the rest of this entry »

October 5th, 2009

Twenty-two power laws of the emerging social economy

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 1:41 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the rest of this entry »

September 6th, 2009

How the Web OS has begun to reshape IT and business

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 9:01 am

Categories: Architecture of Participation, Business Models, Cloud computing, Collective Intelligence, Community, Convergence, Cost-effective scalability, Crowdsourcing, Design Patterns, Encouraging Unintended Uses, Enterprise Web 2.0, Identity, Innovation marketplace, Network Effects, Open APIs, Radical Decentralization, Right To Remix, SOA, SaaS, Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, Social Computing, Social Software, Two-Way Web, User Generated Content, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform, Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA), openid

Tags: Web, Information Technology, Crowdsourcing, Web OS, Channel Management, Marketing, Dion Hinchcliffe

These days in the halls of IT departments around the world there is a growing realization that the next wave of outsourcing, things like cloud computing and crowdsourcing, are going to require responses that will forever change the trajectory of their current relationship with the business, or finally cause them to be relegated as a primarily administrative, keep-the-lights-on function.

IT is going to either have to get more strategic to the business or get out of the way. Businesses too must grow a Web DNA. The proximal cause of this seems to be the growing domination of the global network that surrounds all businesses today: The Web. If you’ve read my writings here since 2006 you largely know what’s happening: Today’s highly evolved Web has grown far beyond its original roots in content distribution and communication. It has become a fully fledged platform for media (TV, movies, music, newspapers, gaming, etc. have been strongly disrupted by the Web and now largely reside there) as well as more strategic pursuits. Probably most significantly is computing in all its many forms. This ranges from low-level services such as raw compute power and storage to social computing, semantics, and collective intelligence.

But the advent of a Web OS is certainly not just an IT story. It’s also — and really mostly — a business story. Those who are trying to track the so-called “big shifts” in the 21st century, thinkers like John Hagel, are attempting to pin down the specific changes taking place in the world today. John recently noted that “we are moving from a relatively stable business environment to one characterized by rapid rates of change with ever more disruptions generating increasing uncertainty and unpredictability“. In this way, routinely transforming instability and rapid change from a threat (which it is to most businesses today) into opportunity is a core skill that organizations increasingly must be able to cultivate.

That much of the pace of change today is driven by the modern world’s pervasive and instant global flows of knowledge is largely due to influence of the Web and its billions of two-way touchpoints with nearly a third of the world’s population (including practically all of the developed world). In addition to ultra fast feedback loops that drive real-time action/response scenarios in the marketplace, the Web has also become an incredibly efficient, inexpensive, and easy-to-use delivery system for just about anything that an interface can be wrapped around.

This has created a new form of leverage in terms of the ability to change and adapt by tapping rapidly and deeply into on-demand resources (be they computing, data, or even people and ideas) in virtually real-time. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal noted that because of modern technology, particularly the Web, business “initiatives that used to take months and megabucks to coordinate and launch can often be started in seconds for cents.” Clearly, this is a brave new world, even if it’s one that’s still happening more on the edge than in the core of businesses today.

WOA = Web-Oriented Architecture
CC/SRR = Creative Commons/Some Rights Reserved
AOP = Architectures of Participation

It’s a world where scarcity practically doesn’t exist and access to abundance is virtually free. It’s also true that the business models of the Web OS are only emerging as well. While monetization is prevalent for those consuming or participating in the Web OS, there is also a real and ongoing concern that it’s also the modern version of sharecropping. That traditional management approaches often don’t understand the nuances of these issues and aren’t designed to take advantage of this modern economic landscape, much less compete with a growing number of businesses that do, is a whole side story I’ll explore when I’m able. But it’s one in which the Web OS is increasingly forcing a serious reevaluation of modern business practices as well as the very notion of how an opportunity is defined, identified, and targeted.

What is the Web OS?

While there are multiple ways of looking at the Web as an operating system, from cloud environments that mimic a desktop operating system to sets of services packaged together and bundled as an individual product to companies, the largest — and the most significant — is the idea of an overarching and emergent Internet operating system. The data, services, and even communities of the Web are now programmatic and can be incorporated and remixed into any other business or product at will. The concept of a Web OS isn’t new. But its arrival on the scene in compelling form with serious impact to the enterprise is.

Over the last few years, as open APIs, social networking platforms, cloud computing, open identity services, sensor-driven databases (such as with GPS and OpenStreetMap), or even people (example: Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) have created open ecosystems in which anyone can participate, including business, both to contribute and to consume. The Web has become the ultimate outsourcing platform and one that is incredibly agile too, combined with economies of scale that are very hard to match. There are challenges too: Unpredictabilities and risks exist that must be dealt with both routinely and successfully.

But to perform well in this changing business environment organizations have to

Read the rest of this entry »

August 18th, 2009

Using social software to reinvent the customer relationship

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 12:11 pm

Categories: Architecture of Participation, Business Models, Business Process Management, Collaboration, Collective Intelligence, Community, Convergence, Cost-effective scalability, Crowdsourcing, Customer Community, Customer Self-Service, Design Patterns, Encouraging Unintended Uses, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0, Governance, Grassroots Community, Innovation marketplace, Network effects, Prediction markets, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Software, User Generated Content, Web 2.0, Web as Platform

Tags: Customer Service, Customer, Social Software, Tool, Organization, Web 2.0 Application, Productivity, Web 2.0, Product Marketing, Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

The elimination of decades of inadequate communication channels will suddenly unleash a tide of many opportunities, as well as challenges, for most organizations.As Web 2.0 applications move more deeply into the strategic operations of enterprises, a unique hybrid of social software has emerged to help businesses deal with the giant sea of customers that awaits them on the other side of the network. While Enterprise 2.0 tools, primarily aimed at collaboration, are certainly part of this story, they often don’t help companies enjoy the full range of possibilities when it comes customer-facing social computing.

Enter the rapidly emerging Social CRM space, an area that’s become significant enough that there’s now a dedicated blog on the subject here on ZDNet by the terrific Paul Greenberg.

This year’s rise of enterprise social computing is opening a new front line in many businesses where the old ways of engaging with customers is no longer sufficient or even competitive. Many organizations I talk to these days are now evaluating the way social software seems to be altering the CRM landscape. In particular, Social CRM has recently come into its own as a leading model for this transformation. For comparison’s sake, online customer communities were a very hot topic last year in this same space, but as I pointed out then, it was surprisingly hard to create them repeatably. My sense is that Social CRM will be a more predictable, reliable model for applying Web 2.0 to customer relationships using many of the strengths of the community model.

Read Michael Krigsman’s 3 Big Reasons CRM Initiatives Fail

This is not to say that many of the social media tools that companies have deployed already aren’t good examples of Social CRM. Many of them are and this highlights a major discussion in the blogosphere last week sparked by SocialText’s Ross Mayfield, who posited that with Social CRM, the people are the platform. The key point here is that where online tools let customers have a social relationship with a business — in other words, interaction that is visible to them and other customers whenever possible — then some Social CRM is taking place. Without a fundamentally community-based relationship, you’re just back to traditional, one-on-one push management of customers. This latter model, a closed and asocial mode of customer interaction, is the very antithesis of Social CRM.

Social CRM: It’s all about people

For its part, Social CRM paints a vision of creating a deeper and more engaging community-based relationship with your customers, instead of the traditional approach of managing them, in a very Cluetrain Manifesto way. Part online community, part crowdsourcing, part customer service, Social CRM can create an emergent, collaborative online partnership with customers that can result in an array of improvements to business performance.

Far from being just for the benefit of the business however, with Social CRM customers tend to 1) be much more in control, 2) are in sustained contact with the organizations they care about, and 3) can use self-service, mutually visible participation, collective history, and peer relationships to assist each other as much — and often much more — than the classic CRM model ever could.

But like any composite, heterogeneous group of participants, Social CRM necessarily entails less deterministic control and outcomes. For example, these new Social CRM tools will let anyone ask a question publicly and anyone else in the community (customers or employees) answer it. Or provide a means to let new ideas flow in from the community in a very Dell IdeaStorm fashion. The question of who decides what the right “official” answer is, or which ideas will be selected and how non-employee submitters will be compensated are currently hard questions to answer for many organizations.

Then there is the challenge that by its very nature Social CRM is

Read the rest of this entry »

July 27th, 2009

Ten top issues in adopting enterprise social computing

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 8:32 am

Categories: Architecture of Participation, Blogs, Business Models, Business Process Management, Collaboration, Collective Intelligence, Community, Convergence, Crowdsourcing, Customer Community, Customer Self-Service, Design Patterns, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0, Enterprise Wikis, Grassroots Community, Hype, Radical Decentralization, Right To Remix, SaaS, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Software, Social media, Social networks, Tagging, Two-Way Web, User Generated Content, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform, Wikis

Tags: Social Media, Social Computing, Social Software, Security Concern, Social Networking, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Dion Hinchcliffe

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

1. 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.
2. 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

Read the rest of this entry »

June 3rd, 2009

Building a vision for Government 2.0

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 4:49 pm

Categories: Architecture of Participation, Business Models, Collaboration, Collective Intelligence, Community, Convergence, Crowdsourcing, Customer Community, Customer Self-Service, Design Patterns, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0, Grassroots Community, Network Effects, Network effects, Right To Remix, SaaS, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Software, The Long Tail, The Social Graph, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform

Tags: Web, Citizen, Web 2.0, Vision, Vivek Kundra, Government, Vertical Industries, Dion Hinchcliffe

Government 2.0 isn’t waiting for a federal mandate. Earlier this week, the nation’s first ever CIO, Vivek Kundra, urged the use of Web 2.0 approaches to address the needs of government and citizens at the Management of Change conference in Norfolk, Virginia. Kundra outlined several important areas where he believed Web 2.0 can help improve government: connecting with citizens and their ideas (social computing), routing around the horizontal and vertical silos surrounding government data (open APIs), and tapping into the potential savings of low-cost new software applications and processing capabilities (SaaS and cloud computing.)

Among the three areas, Kundra’s perception that citizens were a true peer group in the process of governing seemed to come through clearest:

“We’ve got to recognize that we can’t treat the American people as subjects but as a co-creator of ideas. We need to tap into the vast amounts of knowledge… in communities across the country. The federal government doesn’t have a monopoly on the best ideas.”

That the global, pervasive network known as the Internet can directly connect citizens with their government is obviously an idea well-aligned with Web 2.0 ideas. Not that the vision for something known as Government 2.0 is a new one. It goes back to the very beginning of the Web 2.0 discussion. But with a new administration in place in Washington and a passionate CIO that by all appearances is progressive and understands the modern IT era, the timing seems to be ripe for a remaking of government and perhaps even democracy itself.

Fixing what isn’t broken?

Our democracy is not quite 250 years old and its mechanisms have largely served us very well over the years. That we currently have representative government is for a variety of reasons, not the least of which were that the vast distances in our large country used to make wide-scale direct democracy difficult and that considerable expertise and knowledge were perceived to be required to make important government decisions. The Internet, however, with its ability to make any distance equally close and to let us research virtually anything in real-time, has seemingly erased the need to impose such constraints on how we govern ourselves.

But of course there is more to the story. The state of government today is also still very much a “we the people” vs. them, the government. There is a distance between us and our government, at least for most of us, that is reminiscent of paternal days of old when getting involved, unless it was your local assembly, was something that few people had the ability to do. Government was for people who could join it and make a career of it, and many have indeed dedicated their lives to public service. Now, however, there is the means to enable many, many more to be involved and to potentially create a government that fits us and serves us, in our time, better than it can in its present form.

We should also not forget the classic sayings that “bureaucracies exist to perpetuate themselves” and “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”, which are old chestnuts for a reason. The roots of these concerns occasionally need tending to as well.

In short, events of the last couple of years and vast changes in our modern society seem to urge some essential improvements upon our government, if only we had the means:

Improving Government 1.0

• More transparent and accountable. Too much government information is inaccessible from the citizens that paid to create it. Much more than just raw data or collated statistics, which is increasingly opening up already, its the very deliberations of the government machine; the decision making, who made them and why, as well as the actual actions taken, all of which are often far too closed to the governed, yet affect us so profoundly. Make no doubt about it, like Web 2.0 was to the rest of society, opening up daily activity to the daylight is a sea change and governments around the world, never very comfortable with scrutiny or criticism to begin with, will be seriously challenged in an era where their constituents have as much power as they do to communicate. It’s also true that too often the information that is intentionally kept from coming to light that is the most significant. I’m not talking here about secure or classified information; there is information that simply must be kept highly circumscribed for security reasons (though that too is often overdone). For an example of a move in the right direction, OpenSecrets.org is an excellent example of transparent and accountable government information, while Data.gov is also a good start, but only a start. Globally visible, persistent government activity is the enabler here, and Enterprise 2.0, which will be used much more internally within government at first over the next few years, is part of the answer.
• Less expensive, cumbersome, wasteful, and heavyweight. Our current government is largely a construct of the 20th century, when most of the growth and development of the federal government as well as our state and local governments took place. This is a traditional paperwork and hierarchy-driven system where, despite impressive adoption of Web 1.0 as well as numerous bright spots (some dramatically so), far too many of the cowpaths have merely been paved. The way we run our government must be reinvented for a world that has gone decidedly connected, digital, and is increasingly ready to be directly participatory. Not only can the way we interact with citizens and within government be made enormously better and more lightweight, it could cost dramatically less with the application of new technologies and social structures. And as we saw with the rise of nearly revolutionary open business models 10 years ago on the Web, engaging the greater world on the public network is often the best, easiest, and cheapest way to accomplish things, if only we have the freedom to fundamentally rethink the way we do things today. With the federal budget skyrocketing and no end in sight, dramatic means will be required to cut costs sooner rather than later, and some of the more powerful aspects of 2.0 will likely be the answer.
• Not as impersonal and imprecise. Not many people have a regular, meaningful relationship with their government other than paying their taxes and obeying the law. Most of the time, we are a government statistic instead of what we really are: living, breathing citizens. And while the debate on large vs. small government will probably never be over, a new form of government that is far more direct and personal is coming. The very nature of how citizens can connect with, engage, and gain mutual value from our government is changing because of the Internet. With 2.0, the government’s ability to provide a customized experience to each and every citizen so that the services that are provided, whatever they end up being over time, are exactly what we need, right when we need them, often powered by the rest of us. And mass customization is likely just the beginning; Facebook groups and political online communities began to help us self-organize but the legislation of the future as well as national decisions will increasingly be tailored by us and for us in a form of modern digital gerrymandering to fit us like a glove, potentially overcoming at long last the winner takes all tyranny of traditional democracy. E-mail gave us ability to reach our representatives instantly, but social tools, online community, government tools powered by collective intelligence, and participatory citizenship will change our civic lives a great deal more. In the very near future, for better or worse, our relationship with our government is almost certainly going to be closer, more personal, dynamic, and custom fit.

A quick glance at this list shows that it tends to parallel

Read the rest of this entry »

May 15th, 2009

The year of the shift to Enterprise 2.0

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 8:32 am

Categories: Architecture of Participation, Blogs, Business Models, Collaboration, Collective Intelligence, Convergence, Design Patterns, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0, Enterprise Wikis, Network effects, Radical Decentralization, SaaS, Social Computing, Social Software, Social media, Social networks, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Wikis

Tags: Collaboration, Business, Enterprise 2.0, Tool, Organization, Productivity, Dion Hinchcliffe

Traditional collaboration tools can create powerful, local information flows but little build-up of value over time.The latest data emerging on how enterprises are using Web 2.0 tools in the workplace this year is painting a picture of a sea change in the way those businesses conduct collaboration and communication amongst their workers, and to a lesser extent the rest of the world.

Intriguing new just-released reports now show that between a third and one half of businesses either already are or will be employing so-called Enterprise 2.0 tools in the workplace (blogs, wikis, and social networking/messaging) in 2009. The data also show that security concerns remain high, access is actually fairly low, compliance with mainstream enterprise data practices is poor, and some workers aren’t planning to get anywhere near them.

The bottom line: The tools have arrived. How enterprise knowledge and is created and flows within our organizations is beginning to change dramatically.

In my recent post about the return on investment (ROI) of Enterprise 2.0, I cited the most recent widely available data as of mid-2008 saying approximately a third of businesses have the tools in place. However, we know have additional, more recent datapoints that shows both the latest adoption rates as well as some of the concerns that business have with use of the social tools inside and outside their organizations:

• Nearly one in two businesses will make use of Enterprise 2.0 software in 2009. According to a new report from Forrester, despite the novelty of the technologies (only 3 years old), the percentage penetration is very high, about half of all enterprises globally. Tellingly however, actual employee access to the said tools is fairly low and few enterprises are taking a “holistic” approach and are using them in a more targeted and/or fragmented manner.
• Business use of social networking has rough parity with personal use, while a quarter of people are not planning to use the tools at all. A broad new survey of over 6,000 respondents released yesterday by TMCnet and IntelliCom Analytics shows consistent business use of the social networking tools tools across organizations of all sizes and around the globe, ranging from 35% to almost half, depending on the demographic. The survey also found that company policies around social tools also remain far behind adoption, with less than half of all organizations having official policies on use. Also, some workers are determined to be disengaged, with about 25% reporting no plans to use social networks, period.
• Concerns about the security issues with social computing is high, around 80%. A new survey from Deloitte, also released yesterday, showed that Web 2.0 and social engineering security concerns are at an all-time high. Pretexting and phishing are now widely regarded as a serious threat to most organization’s information security.
• At least 50 percent of organizations will use wikis as important work collaboration toos in 2009. This is a slightly older but new to me finding from a respected source, the Society for Information Management’s Advanced Practices Council (APC). The report notes that “with over 75% of the global assets tied up in knowledge assets, having access to increased solutions to improve collaboration productivity is a key growth factor for organizations that want to improve their innovation capacity.” The report itself is only available to members, but is summarized well here.
• Management of content types like SMS/text messages, blogs and wikis are largely off the corporate radar in 75% of organizations. The AIIM State of ECM Report for 2009 says this issue (lack of indexing and archiving of these vital information flows) is a major management risk. It’s also a terrible and unnecessary loss for most organizations.

Proactive organizations: Avoid disruption while managing risk and accessing benefits

While the challenges of taking a business social are many and varied, one critical underlying issue that’s become increasingly clear that businesses need to strike the right balance between the tools they now have for communication and collaboration. A major change has taken place in many organizations over the last year and so there is imbalance and uncertain about how to best use the resources at hand.

To be clear, social tools aren’t the right answer for

Read the rest of this entry »

April 12th, 2009

Determining the ROI of Enterprise 2.0

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 9:27 am

Categories: Architecture of Participation, Blogs, Business Models, Collaboration, Collective Intelligence, Community, Crowdsourcing, Customer Community, Customer Self-Service, Design Patterns, Encouraging Unintended Uses, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0, Enterprise Wikis, Grassroots Community, Network Effects, Network effects, Radical Decentralization, SOA, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Software, Social media, Social networks, Two-Way Web, User Generated Content, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform, Wikis

Tags: Enterprise Software, ROI, Enterprise 2.0, Tool, Productivity, Dion Hinchcliffe

Despite recent statistics showing that Enterprise 2.0 tools have spread to about a third of businesses globally, there remain ongoing questions being asked in the enterprise software community about the real returns that they provide to businesses that deploy them.Many IT solutions create value only after traveling through an indirect chain of cause and effect. Certainly blogs, wikis, and social networks are popular on public networks, but does that translate to meaningful bottom line value to organizations? In other words, is Enterprise 2.0 truly strategic in the unique way that information technology can so often be?

This is a key question since actual penetration of these tools is almost certainly lower than the one third figure I mention above. Most organizations today, even the ones where the applications are available to employees currently, are not yet exhorting workers to adopt these tools en masse despite a suite of compelling arguments and a growing set of case studies. Even impressive citations such as the recent TransUnion Enterprise 2.0 case study that claims an eye-opening 50x return on investment (using the most basic ROI formula for calculating returns) are not yet initiating widespread inquiry.

Instead, while we’re seeing widespread interest and acceptance of Enterprise 2.0 in the workplace, there is still mostly a wait-and-see attitude amongst IT managers and business leaders at the moment. The reasons for this seem to fall into three general categories:

One is an broad wariness of a new horizontal information technology approach that purports to solve so many problems and will overlap extensively with existing solutions from e-mail and instant messaging to content/document management and knowledge management systems, to name just a few. Other related concerns are feelings that workers already have a lot of software to use today, that the tools already exist in the organization (see my Enterprise 2.0 and SharePoint discussion a few weeks ago), or that the available tools aren’t fully enterprise-ready yet.

A second set of issues is related to corporate culture and its fundamentally hierarchical nature, which seems anathema to the flattened, highly social nature of Web 2.0 in the enterprise. At this point, it’s becoming increasingly clear that in some tightly controlled, top-down organizations, culture is indeed an impediment to the use of emergent, social computing. Fortunately, there is now enough evidence visible in current case studies that many industries can indeed benefit from Enterprise 2.0.

The last issue is one that has bedeviled software and its strategic application to business since the very beginning, namely the

Read the rest of this entry »

January 29th, 2009

Using Web 2.0 to reinvent your business for the economic downturn

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 5:27 pm

Categories: Architecture of Participation, Blogs, Business Models, Business Process Management, Cloud computing, Collaboration, Collective Intelligence, Community, Crowdsourcing, Customer Community, Customer Self-Service, Design Patterns, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Mashups, Enterprise Web 2.0, Enterprise Wikis, Governance, Hype, Mashups, Network Effects, Network effects, Open APIs, Right To Remix, SOA, SaaS, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Software, Social media, Social networks, Two-Way Web, User Generated Content, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform, Web services, Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA), Wikis

Tags: Web, Software-as-a-service, Network, Crowdsourcing, Business, Enterprise 2.0, Organization, Chances, Refactoring, Web 2.0

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.

1. 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

Read the rest of this entry »

January 13th, 2009

8 Predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2009

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 12:17 pm

Categories: Blogs, Business Models, Cloud computing, Collaboration, Collective Intelligence, Community, Convergence, Crowdsourcing, Customer Community, Customer Self-Service, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Mashups, Enterprise Web 2.0, Enterprise Wikis, Innovation marketplace, Lightweight Service Models, Mashups, Network Effects, Prediction markets, Rich Internet Applications (RIA), SOA, SaaS, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social media, Social networks, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA), Wikis

Tags: Web, Web 2.0, Information Technology, Industry, Business, SOA, Technology, Organization, Prediction, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

We are starting 2009 off in a particularly inauspicious economic climate, though as we’ll see, important opportunities also exist. 2008 was a very tough year for many businesses and industries and it’s almost as hard to see how things could get worse as it is to understand how things can get better. To survive and thrive, organizations will be looking to make the most of what they already have while gearing up to weather an unknown landscape of challenges this year. These concerns frame up the majority of my Enterprise Web 2.0 predictions for this year, though not all.

I predict a rebuilding year for most organizations, with a few that will use innovative new ideas to break out with major successes.Before we review what’s likely to happen this year, let’s take a quick look at 2008’s predictions:

I led off my list last year with the pronouncement that SOA was becoming lighter weight and more Web-oriented, which was largely borne out. Last summer’s numerous online debates about things like Web-Oriented Architecture and the future of SOA eventually culminated in some bold conclusions by industry leaders such as Anne Thomas Manes who went as far as to declare SOA dead as of a few days ago, being eclipsed by “mashups, BPM, SaaS, Cloud Computing, and all other architectural approaches that depend on ’services’“. It’s clear that SOA isn’t really dead however, but evolving markedly in response to years of experience as well major business and technological changes in the industry.

My predictions for little progress on enterprise search and for growing security concerns around Enterprise Web 2.0 also seemed to do well with many IT leaders expressing frustration in both fronts in my discussions with them throughout the year. The rise of social networking in the enterprise, the adoption of Enterprise 2.0, and the use of mobile applications in business also scored well with numerous surveys and research showing impressive uptake.

Other predictions didn’t fare as well or their outcome is unclear or hard to determine. These include significant early adoption of tools to take the unstructured information in blogs and wikis and mine them, the rise of Microsoft Silverlight in the enterprise (though Adobe AIR seemed to do fairly well), significant early adoption of collective intelligence applications/decision support, and a push by IT for governance budget for Enterprise Web 2.0 systems and applications. I also missed out on predicting the advent of cloud computing, one of the year’s biggest news stories.

Finally, two of last year’s predictions in particular are going to be much bigger in 2009 than in 2008. These are the shake out of Enterprise Web 2.0 vendors and the uptake of enterprise mashups, more on those below.

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 room for major new products in industry sectors and classes of data that haven’t seen wide penetration online yet. This will also include, as we’ll see, areas that have only partially thrived online traditionally, like real estate and investment banking, that now must be completely transformed and remade, as the downfall of these industries leaves a large vacuum that must be filled by something.

8 Predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2009

1. Tight budgets will drive the adoption of low-cost Web 2.0 and cloud/SaaS solutions. This seems like an obvious prediction but how it plays out will be very interesting. This could end up actually helping the smaller Enterprise Web 2.0 players as companies look to get away from the big-ticket, enterprise-class offerings from major vendors like IBM, Oracle, and others. But in reality, once enterprises make the decision to move to platforms for wikis, enterprise mashups, cloud services, SaaS enterprise apps, and so on, they may find the one-stop shop of pre-integrated solutions from entrenched software providers more than they can resist. Make no mistake, however, IT shops and businesses alike will be looking to cut costs and I expect a lot of IT and business downsizing to happen in a surge of “Economics 2.0″.

2. Online community and 2.0 technologies become a priority for most organizations. The early data from our IT and Business Outlook Survey for 2009 shows these two areas as

Read the rest of this entry »