November 12th, 2009

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

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 4:18 am

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

Tags: Social Computing, Enterprise 2.0, Dion Hinchcliffe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where is Enterprise 2.0 headed?

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

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

  

• There is still lots of debate about how to

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October 5th, 2009

Twenty-two power laws of the emerging social economy

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 1:41 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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September 28th, 2009

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

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 2:21 pm

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

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

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

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

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

Click To Enlarge

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

Surveying Enterprise 2.0 practitioners

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

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

A. Essential

B. Important

C. Not that important

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

Community Management Survey Results:

Click To Enlarge

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

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

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

There were also more general statements of affirmation like:

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

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

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

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

Community Management: Not new but newly focused on social collaboration

But what exactly does a community manager do?

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September 17th, 2009

Going beyond the hype: Identifying Enterprise 2.0 best practices

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 10:39 am

Categories: Business Models, Collaboration, Community, Customer Community, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0, Enterprise Wikis, Governance, Grassroots Community, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Software, Web 2.0, Wikis

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Best Practice, Dion Hinchcliffe

There’s been plenty of discussion recently in the blogosphere, including here, about the successes and challenges of Enterprise 2.0 projects. But there’s still just a rough general sense of what it really takes to create an effective collaborative community using social tools.

It’s starting to become clear that successful Enterprise 2.0 efforts have community management as a core function. Stewart Mader’s guest post this week on Dennis Howlett’s blog here on ZDNet helps tell part of this story: As businesses go about their daily activities, they aren’t looking for either Enterprise 2.0 or a social tool like a wiki for its own sake. Instead, they are looking to solve problems and meet their deadlines in easier, cheaper, and better ways. To the extent that social computing can help do this, it will remain a topical subject in business and IT. To the extent that it’s a distraction, a risk, or more overhead, it won’t.

Those trying to read the tea leaves about Enterprise 2.0 these days can see that the software at least has arrived in a bare majority of companies, even if it’s just Facebook or Twitter across the firewall. Genuine adoption and meaningful integration into business processes has certainly happened in a number of organizations, but is still the edge case today rather than the rule. That’s not to say the current case studies aren’t reporting gains, they generally are. But the message here is that many enterprises are now actively in full contact with the social computing world, whether they want to or not, and now it’s time to understand how to deal with the benefits and issues.

What does seem to be emerging are the first broad outlines of a body of knowledge on how to make social computing work in a business setting. So-called best practices and effective techniques are beginning to be identified and understood. And if one accepts that some level of adoption of social tools is inevitable in most workplaces (just not that big an “if” these days), then understanding how to manage the upside while dealing with any potential downsides of Enterprise 2.0 just makes good business sense.

The advent of most new technology improvements to business ultimately get codified into frameworks or methodologies, big formal sounding words that just refer to systematic ways of identifying and applying methods in a given discipline. This helps identify and organize practices that work and ones that don’t by ensuring new efforts don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time. The first social software and Enterprise 2.0 methodologies are now beginning to emerge, some explicitly but most implicitly, as practitioners assess their early successes and try to understand what worked and what didn’t.

Emerging best practices in social software

The last couple of years has seen a steady, conscious effort to collect and codify social computing techniques and best practices. These include:

• Andrew McAfee’s attempt to create a pattern language for Enterprise 2.0.
• Stewart Mader’s excellent Wikipatterns.
• Sun’s well produced Social Software Pattern Language.
• The social patterns captured in Designing Social Interfaces by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone and probably best summarized here.

But while these efforts are laudable and often extremely useful when designing social software or structuring online communities, they often lack

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September 9th, 2009

Government 2.0: A tale of "risk, control, and trust"

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 10:55 am

Categories: Blogs, Business Models, Collaboration, Community, Crowdsourcing, Customer Community, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0, Enterprise Wikis, Government 2.0, Network Effects, Open APIs, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Software, Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Platforms, Web as Platform, Wikis

Tags: Web, Environment, Social Computing, Tool, Communication Line, A-Space, Government, Productivity, Vertical Industries, Dion Hinchcliffe

Yesterday in downtown Washington DC I was fortunate to be able to attend two important Government 2.0 events: the LMI Executive Forum on Mission 2.0 and O’Reilly/TechWeb’s Government 2.0 Expo. Both of these events highlighted the benefits as well as the challenges of improving the way the government does so much of what it does today.

Self-organizing and self-directed behavior is much more likely in the government of the near-future.

Social collaboration, information sharing, and open data were broad themes extensively explored and certainly championed by many at both events, admittedly myself one of them. Cautious optimism was apparent in the participants as there seems to be a broadening consensus that there will be striking changes in government over the next few years. This optimism was occasionally overshadowed in many discussions by the recurrence of issues such as the challenges that bureaucracy poses to progress including HR, policy, reward systems, and management motivations. Especially evident were worries about the classic issues of hierarchical management which LMI Executive Forum participant Mark Oehlert summarized smartly in three broad themes: “Risk, control, and trust.“

The interest, however, in improving government through the innovative use of the latest Web 2.0 approaches and tools is at the moment reaching nearly a fever pitch in the public sector, at least in the nation’s capital. Throughout the summer and fall there have been events and meetups around the Washington DC area exploring how social computing, Enterprise 2.0, agile integration, and data sharing between agencies in the federal government can achieve many of the goals for next-generation government that those, including national CIO Vivek Kundra, have been expounding in recent months.

A lot of this recent interest has been spurred by a new administration, particularly President Barack Obama’s early moves this year, and the issuance in particular of the Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies on Transparency and Open Government. In this document, Obama says that:

Government should be collaborative. Collaboration actively engages Americans in the work of their Government. Executive departments and agencies should use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector.

While orders and memoranda are issued all the time in government, often without substantial impact, the broad influence of social computing these days, both in the consumer space as well as the enterprise, has made social systems one of the top approaches of interest when it comes to open government initiatives this year, as we’ll see from the discussions yesterday.

Exploring Mission 2.0: An emerging subset of Government 2.0

The LMI Executive Forum yesterday was attended by senior members of various government agencies including the CIA, DNI, and the DoD. The attendees, including myself as a guest, discussed at length social computing in the federal workplace, in particular the more secure, mission-oriented environments such as the intelligence community. The use of Web 2.0 tools in this environment can be called Mission 2.0.

A number of key points came out of the discussion that highlight the differences between private sector use of Web 2.0 approaches and their realization in a so-called Mission 2.0 environment. In particular is

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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

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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

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June 8th, 2009

Reconciling social computing with the enterprise

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 5:07 pm

Categories: Architecture of Participation, Business Models, Collaboration, Community, Convergence, Crowdsourcing, Customer Community, Customer Self-Service, Design Patterns, Encouraging Unintended Uses, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0, Grassroots Community, Hype, Network Effects, Network effects, Products, Right To Remix, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Software, The Social Graph, Two-Way Web, User Generated Content, Web 2.0, Web as Platform

Tags: Social Computing, Worker, Tool, Organization, Singularities, Social Networking, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Dion Hinchcliffe

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

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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

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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

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