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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