September 30th, 2009

Outsourcing picks up for smaller enterprises

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 8:08 am

Categories: outsourcing

Tags: Application Development, Information Technology, Outsource, Service Provider, IT Organization, Outsourcing, Managed Hosting, Software Development, It Operations, Business Operations

The outsourcing market has traditionally been perceived as something only the larger enterprises entertain. Research from Computer Economics suggests that as the large enterprise business has become tougher, the outsourcing companies are getting better at reaching the smaller and mid-sized market.

The reports author concentrates on providing the stats and not adding a huge amount of analysis but even so, there is plenty to chew upon. I called up Frank Scavo, owner of CE to get his take on a few of the numbers. “These findings suggest the outsourcers are doing a much better job of communicating their value proposition into the small and mid-market. That’s interesting because while traditionally we tend to think smaller companies are willing to try new things, in this market at least, they are surprisingly conservative.”

From the report’s key findings:

Outsourcing services gaining the most strength among customers include help desk, desktop support, data center operations, and website/e-commerce systems outsourcing. Large organizations, in particular, are making greater use of help desk outsourcing.

Outsourcing services making the smallest gains are application maintenance, application development, and data network operations service providers. Application development, while still the single most frequently outsourced function, is losing ground in the current economic environment as organizations cut back on project-based work.

The three most popular IT functions to outsource include data center operations, disaster recovery, and website/e-commerce systems. These IT functions are both frequently outsourced and outsourced at relatively high levels compared to other functions in this study.

The typical IT organization spends about 5% to 6% of its total IT budget on outsourcing services. This is true regardless of the organization’s size.

IT organizations are experiencing the most cost overruns with application development, website/e-commerce systems, and data network operations outsourcing contracts. They have the easiest time predicting costs for IT security, voice network operations, and data center operations outsourcing contracts.

Application development and application maintenance are most-frequently offshore outsourced IT functions, while disaster recovery services and IT security are the two functions least likely to be sent to offshore service providers.

It was particularly interesting to compare the experiences in applications development between small/mid size and larger enterprises. According to the report, 34% of small/midsize businesses experienced cost over-runs while the figure was 24% for large enterprises: “We know that application development is notorious for cost over-runs and so it has proven. I suspect that the smaller businesses have yet to fully understand what they’re buying into, how to negotiate and so on. They’ll get better at this but will need some help along the way,” said Frank.

Another area of potential confusion is that outsourcing is synonymous with offshoring. According to the survey results this is far from being true with 24%  small/midsize and 46% large companies opting for an offshored offering. From the report:

Keep in mind, however, that while the frequency of offshore outsourcing may be rising, this does not mean the actual size of the market for offshore service providers is rising. Along with most other technology vendors and service providers, offshore service providers are experiencing the effects of the recession and a slowdown in IT spending. In particular, capital spending on application development projects, one of the most widely outsourced functions, is being severely impacted. Still, the percentage of outsourcing customers using offshore service providers is rising.

Data of this kind is always useful, especially when you consider the rates at which outsourcers are able to deliver services at or around the expected costs the customer had in mind. Even so, it is clear from CE’s report that the smaller customers have plenty to learn from their larger colleagues.

The report is available here including a free download of the first 8 pages

September 30th, 2009

Salesforce.com and CODA hook up

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 3:18 am

Categories: Enterprise applications, saas

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., CODA, FinancialForce.com, Sales Force Management, Sales, Dennis Howlett

Salesforce.com and CODA (via its parent Unit 4 Agresso) are hooking up to create FinancialForce.com. While financial details of the arrangement were not revealed, Salesforce.com is a minority stakeholder in the new company. From the blurbs:

The CODA 2go team and products have transferred to FinancialForce.com, which will be run from the company’s new corporate headquarters in San Mateo, California as well as from its EMEA headquarters in Harrogate in the UK. FinancialForce.com already has established sales, pre-sales and support teams in North America and the UK to take the new solution to market. Salesforce.com will provide first line support for FinancialForce.com, giving customers of both Salesforce CRM and FinancialForce applications a single consistent point of contact.

At first blush this looks like a marketing play by both companies but there is more to this than meets the eye.

From Salesforce.com’s perspective it can now claim kudos for extending itself to look more like NetSuite. From CODA’s perspective, it gets more development klout inside the Salesforce.com gravity field while benefiting from the Salesforce.com marketing halo.

I spoke with Jeremy Roche, who now becomes CEO of FinancialForce.com as well as retaining his leadership role with CODA: “We represent the biggest development on the Force.com platform and see ourselves as a driving force there. We are for instance providing Salesforce.com with experience in scaling up for example in using the batch Apex feature for providing manipulations in bulk revaluations.”

Asked about the go to market angle, Jeremy said: “There’s no question that being permitted to carry the Force.com name makes a difference but we expect this will give us more ways to go to market than are readily available today. Having the credibility of the Force.com behind us makes a difference in what are really new markets where CODA is not so well known.”

We then discussed what this means in the real world to which Jeremy replied: “Software as a service opens up revenue streams that are just not available in the on-prem world so for instance we are discovering that some customers wish to use as financial middleware. They use Salesforce.com as their main way of doing business and we both record and expose the debits and credits. An example might be where customers are using the Service Cloud and need financial information on contract renewal.”

Technical buyers will be interested in knowing who owns what and how it all fits together. According to Jeremy, FinancialForce.com uses the Salesforce.com master data model and then extends it: “As you know, some data for say ‘customer’ is common but we need other things that Salesforce.com would not provide like knowing which part of the chart of accounts a customer fits into. That’s where we extend without interfering with the master.”

As the service grows, it will be interesting to see how the two companies manage reporting, an issue I know is on the mind of Salesforce.com co-founder Parker Harris: “We make use of Salesforce.com’s reporting and dashboarding but some companies are looking for corporate performance reporting style information. For that we currently link to Ucalc but also provide a web service driven interface for Excel because that’s what the accountants want. We can manipulate in cubes anyway as CODA2go is built on that premise so we get a lot of slice and dice but no, it doesn’t do everything we want today. It will come,” said Jeremy.

Disclosure: CODA2go is a sponsor to my personal weblog

September 29th, 2009

The burnout risks for E2.0 community managers

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 6:00 am

Categories: Social computing

Tags: Community, Organization, Community Manager, Dion Hinchcliffe, Community Management, Real Estate, Blogging, Productivity, Wiki, Business Operations

Dion Hinchcliffe’s piece on community management surprised me. There is a sense that Dion is trying to lay down some ground rules in an area that is too new for anyone to draw anything other than tentative and early stage conclusions. That’s not to say that conclusions are incorrect. There is plenty with which to agree but it is not enough. There is a gaping hole down which many otherwise well intended projects will fall.

Culture is sometimes a bone of contention in community building and maintenance discussions but history and experience tell us that many large organizations develop cultures either accidentally or by design. There is an excellent article from M Jason Martin, the University of Florida from 2006 where he says:

Culture permeates all aspects of any society. It acts as the basic fabric that binds people together. Culture dictates tastes in music, clothes, and even the political and philosophical views of a group of people. Culture is not only shared, but it is deep and stable.^[1] However, culture does not exist simply as a societal phenomenon. Organizations, both large and small, adhere to a culture. Organizational culture determines how an organization operates and how its members frame events both inside and outside the organization.

Culture has to be accommodated in community management. It isn’t easy and as Dion implies, the role is often poorly resourced, adding to the difficulties faced.

As someone who has been closely involved in helping a large organization figure out a collaboration strategy, execute against it with social tools, hit a whole bunch of potholes and have as yet to fully emerge out the other side after two years, I’m reasonably familiar with the issues he raises and then some.

It should be no surprise that the baseline issue: should these kinds of endeavor have community management? produced a 95% positive response rate.

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.

Regardless of whether a project is IT related or not, why would you not want people in leadership roles? This was something Booz Allen alluded to in Dion’s quoted text yet I disagree with Dion’s assertion that community managers need to be ‘jacks of all trades’:

Part of the need for this wide skill set seems to be that since community management as a practice is still largely understood poorly (and consequently the need for it can be hard to understand) it is thus often poorly resourced. The tasks of community management then often devolve onto the shoulders of those trying to realize their Enterprise 2.0 effort, but without the skills or time to do it. This does mean that an Enterprise 2.0 can end up being more work than originally planned over the long haul than it appears to be to outsiders or first-timers. Either that or the community doesn’t get the support it needs day-in and day-out to thrive and ultimately languishes.

It must be patently obvious that no one person can hope to carry all roles, especially as it relates to a large organization. So while the ‘need’ may be a matter of practical reality for some organizations, it is a falsehood for companies to assume that should be the norm. Having said that, it is an easy mistake to make and one where I have seen community managers driven out of organizations simply because they couldn’t keep 10 balls in the air. Organizations massively under-estimate the need for people skills as integral to community projects and that success will be a lot harder to achieve than they imagine.

I lay the responsibility for this kind of failure at the door of those who have made community sound much easier than is the reality. It leads to the folly of believing that because E2.0 tools are relatively inexpensive, the implementation and management costs should be equally trivial. I’d say that usability issues aside, there is no correlation between tools cost and people requirements in either E2.0 management or operational roles. Especially in the crucial early stages. There is a gulf between running an individual blog, collective blog or forum (as examples) where there are naturally occurring common interests and the strictures under which those carrying out these types of project in a large enterprise labor.

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September 29th, 2009

Is the enterprise market tipping towards SaaS?

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 3:24 am

Categories: ERP, Enterprise applications

Tags: SuccessFactors Inc., SAP AG, ERP, Workday, Ray Wang, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Workforce Management, Operational Accounting, Enterprise Software, Software

Ray Wang’s informative scorecard for SaaS vendor revenues versus the on-premise vendors is worth deeper study:

For a better view of the numbers, click the scorecard to enlarge (or hop to Ray’s site). What’s interesting to me is that even the so-called specialist minnows in the SaaS space are doing well in comparison to more established names in the broader ERP space. That could be a function of being in the right place at the right time: Taleo and SuccessFactors, both talent management players are benefiting from the downturn as customers seek to rightsize while retaining the best skills they can. It reminds me of i2’s heyday when demand planning was all the rage so perhaps we shouldn’t read too much into reported relative success. But as I said in an earlier post, SuccessFactors massive win at Siemens was certainly a warning sign that incumbent ERP players are not getting it all their own way. On the quiet however, I am hearing that Q3 for at least some of the SaaS players is not going to be as rosy as the market might expect. We’ll see in a few weeks’ time when they all start to declare earnings. Let’s not be too hasty in declaring premature SaaS victory even if it can sound compelling. There is a long way to go.

In his analysis Ray says:

Continued economic pressures force customers to choose best of breed and purpose built solutions. SaaS vendors appear to be the beneficiary as the overall business model aligns with client pain points. On-premise vendors will also win as they reduce the cost of entry and provide effective price points for purpose built solution modules in demand by clients. With very little hope for a recovery in 2009, vendors will have to adjust their go-to-market strategies to deal with waning deal sizes. It’ll take more than a hat trick in 2009 to stabilize revenues. With 4 months to go, vendors should rethink their 2010 strategies to address price points, financing options, and module availability.

Over the last few months, offline conversations between Ray, VInnie Mirchandani and myself have in part focused on the need for white space apps the large scale vendors don’t seem able to build quickly enough. In the SME space I see more concentration on the provision of vertically oriented SaaS products. They’re all doing moderately well, in part because the way SaaS is built provides a much faster way of getting services into the market than the traditional on-prem guys. Having an opex spend model to dangle in front of cash strapped CIO’s makes a helluva difference when compared to the million dollar deals that SAP/Oracle want to pluck.

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September 28th, 2009

NetSuite's Zach Nelson on competition, cost, the Next Big Thing

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 6:00 am

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: NetSuite Inc., Zach Nelson, SAP AG, Financial Planning, Smb/Sme, Branding, Marketing Research, Finance, Marketing, Dennis Howlett

Last week I met with Zach Nelson, CEO NetSuite in circumstances very similar to those when I recently met with SAP. There are obvious comparisons:

• SAP provided a hands on individual demonstration of Business ByDesign, NetSuite limited its demo to some pre-canned scenarios demonstrated by Mini Peiris, VP product marketing.
• Both companies were running the app on a crabby network, SAP slightly edged it on non-business analytics application performance.
• SAP customers took questions from the floor, Zach Nelson served as the Q&A ringmaster but asked the kinds of question I would expect put to any customer.
• NetSuite was clearly trying to sell the concept of cloud computing including a cloud economics lesson from analyst Robin Bloor, SAP assumes that ByDesign is just another offering in its portfolio without necessarily differentiating the economics involved.
• SAP ran the whole thing over a day, NetSuite was done inside three hours.

But there were some striking similarities. Both companies have a tendency to go down the ‘bits and bytes’ route while fielding questions when in reality the SME market couldn’t care less. They want to know about immediate business value. In that sense, NetSuite does a better job because it is able to concentrate on the cloud story whereas SAP has to pitch two sorts of competing story with ByDesign and All-in-One.

Listening to NetSuite customers, it was clear they made decisions based on the maturity of the NetSuite service at the time compared to other offerings in the market. It will be interesting to see how NetSuite fares once SAP puts its marketing foot on the gas pedal.

As I noted before, SAP can play the brand card where NetSuite has yet to achieve significant visibility. In the UK for instance, it is almost unknown. Talking to other analysts in the US, it seems you either know NetSuite and love them or you don’t know who they are.

In the accompanying video, Zach talks about competitive marketing, cost compares to on premise applications and gives a hint about NetSuite’s next big thing.

September 25th, 2009

NetSuite on iPhone: customer story

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 7:42 am

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Apple iPhone, NetSuite Inc., Smart Phones, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, Dennis Howlett

I recorded a quick and dirty video of Peter Bauer, CEO Mimecast a NetSuite user talking about the service delivered on the iPhone.

My experience is that most iPhone business apps are not very useful. This is the exception. Peter says that he can get everything he needs from NetSuite in this form factor. That’s impressive.

September 22nd, 2009

Zoho's Next Big Thing

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 11:39 am

Categories: ERP, Enterprise applications, cloud computing

Tags: Zoho, Smb/Sme, Sales Force Management, Sales, Dennis Howlett

Zoho has announced the availability of Zoho Discussions. Of itself you might think this is a smallish me-too announcement given that it can be construed as support forums-reinvented for the new millennium with some bells and whistles thrown in. That would be a gross underestimate of the company’s offering or its longer term intent.

Looking at the extensive feature set alone should provide some clues. At a high level - and I’m cherry picking:

• Integrated chat
• Profiles
• Private messages
• Watchlists
• Profilies
• Search
• Related topics
• Sticky posts
• Topic status
• Announcements
• Email to post/drop box
• Public/private forums

In pointing Discussions in the direction of customer support, Zoho is opening the door to pro-active customer service that can be executed in a number of different ways, according to both the business problem and the user’s preferred method of handling. That could be an invite only chat session, internal and/or outbound email or forums. At that level it sounds a bit like our new good friend Social CRM but again that would only be a piece of the equation.

Before moving on I’d like to say that making forums explicit is a really smart move. Despite all the talk of blogs etc, many of those I interact with ask ‘What’s wrong with using forums?’ Nothing at all but in extending the metaphor Zoho is appealing to a ready made audience with something that’s fresh and intriguing.

In order to understand where this is going you really need to take a 10,000 foot view of the whole Zoho suite of applications and ask yourself: What have they been doing? Keen observers will have noted that up until this release, Zoho has had a quiet 2009. That’s because it’s been spending much of its time integrating different Zoho applications. Step forward a few paces.

Imagine that the functionality contained in Discussions is now accessible to Zoho CRM, Projects, Sheet and Writer via a single mouse click. Now you have the start of a very rich collaborative business environment in which you can do one heck of a lot more than simply flog ’stuff.’ Take another step and imagine that Zoho integrates with QuickBooks. Now you’re into a whole new league where Zoho might have the capability of turning transactional data into valuable information that can be mined in real time and merged with data that’s emerging in the more social styles of application, forums and so on.

When Zoho goes this route (not if), then we see the emergence of what I’ve been arguing for several years: content and process in context = transformational value. No more blog/wiki/RSS etc siloes to be hand integrated into the transactions that drive bottom line success but real time in-flight information that can be used as the kernel for the kinds of alert systems needed to drive transformational value in/around and across collaborative teams.

Zoho isn’t going on the record with this but it doesn’t deny the direction either. Given the company’s development history, I’m betting this is where they go. They’ll integrate third parties along the way so watch how they do it. Zoho always integrates first and develops later as it learns how users interact. It also spends time eating its own dogfood as the beta test bed for what you see today. With a 1,000 internal users focused on saas apps to pick from, they can easily test, debug, retest and polish before any service sees the light of day.

What does this mean? Those of us who have bemoaned the feet of clay state of enterprise apps have long held the view that we have as yet to see the emergence of a credible alternative to traditional ERP or for that matter the current saas incumbents like Salesforce.com and NetSuite. Zoho is not ready for prime time. But it can scale, has a burgeoning set of ‘good enough’ integrated applications and now, with Discussions, the jump off point to start hammering at the doors of SMEs who might otherwise be tempted by a combination of Salesforce.com, Google Apps for Enterprise and possibly a bit of CODA2Go thrown in.

Zoho will say that it is firmly rooted in the SME space and will most likely play a bit below the place where Salesforce.com and NetSuite position themselves. That’s a huge whitespace but one where it is possible to articulate a coherent and valuable story.

Aside and Update: for a bit of fun I asked the Twitterati what they understand is the direction with Discussions. @lehawes nailed it: They’re becoming a Business Operating System.

September 21st, 2009

Move over Enterprise 2.0, it's now Social Business Design

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 1:01 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: BPR, Enterprise 2.0, Re-engineering, Cohen, Oliver Marks, Business Process Engineering, Organizational Structure, Business Process Reengineering (BPR), Human Resources, It Operations

Given the relatively friendly pounding I took over my Enterprise 2.0 - what a crock post, it’s gratifying to see that it has stirred some interesting interpretations and thoughts on the topic. That’s always good and especially pleasing when one considers that most blog posts are the equivalent of digital fish wrap: something that’s readily disposable and as forgettable as yesterday’s news. But all frivolity aside, this is a serious business, one that is consuming a lot of cycles and will be chewing up much consulting time as different firms make plays in this space. I’d hate to think user companies are wasting their money along the way when there are so many important things driving IT’s attention. The good  news is that at last, a few well intentioned people have moved the conversation forward to something I can understand, even though I remain far from convinced.

First up is Stowe Boyd, who, in commenting on my polemic said:

The world in which work exists has changed fairly drastically in recent years, and so we are seeing a fundamental reset in the nature of work. On a secondary level, this translates into changes in how people communicate, coordinate, and collaborate, and this, then, leads to changes in information technology and related practices. Note, however, that talking about the secondary effects of these global business and social changes in and of themselves is, from my point of view, not a very illuminating exercise at the best, and at the worst, completely misleading.

In a way, you could interpret Den[n]is’ polemic as making a similar point, but I don’t think that his perceptions are based on the sense of a sweeping change in the world of business, but rather the views that the timeless nature of business operations have nothing to do with knowledge management.

That’s a moderately accurate assessment of my position though the only reset I see comes in the length of the dole queue. I don’t see the sweeping changes of which Stowe speaks but a protectionism on the part of employees hoping they won’t be pink slipped any time soon. But then I’m aware that Stowe’s approach is based on what appears to be a political agenda exemplified in this part of his post:

In essence, forward-looking companies will devise something like a constitution and a bill of rights that attempt to lay out a worldview about the purpose of the firm, what it stands for, how it will treat its customers, what is expected from employees, and what the social contract between the company and individuals — employees and customers — is.

That’s problematic at many levels. I’ve never walked into a company yet where the democratic ideals of which Stowe speaks are even vaguely evident. I keep coming back to what motivates people. It sure ain’t no sense of altruism towards their fellow man. If it was then we wouldn’t have the whiff of fraud immediately prior to the Dell acquisition of Perot Systems. Or the cynical use of TARP funds to line top bankers’ pockets or the 199 subprime related lawsuits. Or the asinine emails I get from people only caring about an SAP Certification because it might mean a huge paycheck somewhere down the line. Or the almost complete failure by governments to convince many of us that global warming is a reality we need to deal with on anything other than economic grounds. Here’s what I mean:

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September 15th, 2009

SAP: brand value and benefits

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 6:01 am

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Brand, Benefit, SAP AG, Smb/Sme, Branding, Marketing, Dennis Howlett

Want to know the brand value that SAP delivers to SME customers? Can SAP be implemented in less than 12-18 months? Heard all those tales about how SAP’s GUI sucks? Check out this video of Mark Ipema, operational manager at Dishman Netherlands, a $27 million revenue pharmaceutical manufacturer that has implemented SAP Business All-in-One in 11 weeks. There’s a lot of surprises.

September 14th, 2009

Rules are for impatient people

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 4:39 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Software, Enterprise 2.0, Web Site, Tool, Wiki, Online Communications, Dennis Howlett

This is a guest post by Stewart Mader, founder & senior consultant at Future Changes.

Over the past few weeks, discussion about the meaning of the term Enterprise 2.0 has popped back up. James Dellow sums it up:

It’s been interesting to read some of the blog posts that have come across my radar during the last few weeks about Enterprise 2.0. The ZDNet bloggers in particular have been busy here (and my own response), here (actually a guest post by Sameer Patel), but even Andrew McAfee jumped in to respond to some earlier posts by others, including my own.

Dennis Howlett gave an example of Western Digital’s use of discussion forums for customer feedback - something that’s arguably collaborative, allows employees and customers to share information, and is used to gather suggestions for improvements. Is this Enterprise 2.0?

Some years back I was a hack attending an IDC (I think) conference where Western Digital presented their use of forums as a way of getting customer feedback on what they were offering plus improvements they could make. At the time it was deemed a success. No-one bothered calling it Enterprise 2.0 or anything close. It was part of doing business. Fast forward to the present. We’re regaled with reasons to ‘do’ the E2.0 thing. But what has changed out there in enterprisey land?

In Return on Adoption: Help People Solve Business Problems, I pointed out the long history and concrete uses of another tool - wiki:

Wikis long predate any discussion of the terms web 2.0, enterprise 2.0, and social media. The wiki has a long history of use, starting with its development in 1995 as a counterpart to centralized code management tools used by developers to work collectively and keep team efforts organized. There are concrete uses for a wiki (see 8 Things You Can do With an Enterprise Wiki for examples), specific ways to catalyze and lead adoption of the tool (see Wikipatterns for examples), and concrete ways to measure its utility in your organization – Return on Adoption (see Wikipatterns).

But none of this is really new. I saw the same thing two years ago, and in the early part of this decade in higher education. When course management software started to become a major presence in higher education, it sparked a debate over how – and whether – to centralize the creation of course websites and curriculum content using IT-administered enterprise software.

Before course management systems, faculty typically developed their own course websites with common items like syllabus, reading materials, links to relevant websites, etc. There was significant variation in the sophistication and quality of these websites, and the great promise of course management systems was to remove this variation and introduce consistency by giving people a common set of tools that would be easier to learn than building a website from scratch.

The same debates were there: Was it just about the tools, or really about better pedagogy? Who owned the curriculum materials – faculty or the university? How would you attract the early adopters and convince them to move their content to the new platform? How would you catalyze and lead broad adoption? How would you measure the ROI? Who would pay for it? This last one was particularly fun in an environment where 1) there truly is never enough money, and 2) the shift was from piecemeal web sites developed by faculty at what was seen as no cost (in reality, they were shouldering it themselves by buying their own software and training manuals) to a software system that needed resources and a line item in the IT budget – or was it the dean’s budget? Split among all the colleges? Or should the Provost pay?

Over time, these issues have been debated and settled in various ways. Some universities cover the cost as an IT expense; others pay for it from academic budgets. Still others share the cost between IT and colleges (which gives both a say in how things are managed). Course management and online learning systems have matured considerably. There are commercial software vendors like Blackboard, open source projects like Moodle and Sakai, and a variety of homegrown tools. Instructional technology and curriculum development departments at many universities assist faculty in learning how to use the software and design materials that take advantage of the capabilities of technology to enhance learning. All of this has taken time, and there is no single set of rules that all institutions can follow to be successful.

To me, a term like Enterprise 2.0 is a nice label to affix once you recognize that there is something visibly different about how an organization functions. For example, universities that have encouraged wide adoption and use of technology in teaching and learning, developed online courses in addition to traditional ones, and changed the educational environment to emphasize learning for understanding instead of content delivery and memorization could conceivably be given the label “Enterprise 2.0.” Universities are enterprises, and 2.0 represents a change from 1.0.

Enterprise 2.0 is a lot like the term “innovate” vs. “innovative”. When I see something that’s really impressive, I might label it as innovative, after the fact. When I hear someone talk about how they’re going to innovate, my built-in BS detector goes off.

Being innovative is not something you do based on a neat, step-by-step process. There isn’t a universal set of rules that make your behavior innovative. It’s a result of understanding the purpose of your work, observing how it gets done and thinking critically about your role, and recognizing the things you can do to make it better. Sometimes that results in refinements, and other times it leads to more significant changes. But when you’re in tune with the purpose and process, you intuitively know when and why change is necessary, and you can communicate that to others with authenticity.

In sum, here are several timeless patterns I’ve observed in my years of working with a variety of organizations on technology adoption. As Merlin Mann said in a recent speech, “This is not a list. It is a list of four things, but don’t think of it as a list. Because that makes me mad. Item 1.”

1. Never underestimate how busy people are, and how quickly they will ignore or dismiss something they don’t see as useful.
2. What has worked for me, time and time again, is to work my way through an organization team by team, department by department, and find out what day to day problems people want to solve. (My work with the Brown University Chemistry Department on a language tool for international graduate students is just such an example. We didn’t use a wiki for wiki’s sake; we built a source of information to help graduate students learn how to use technical terms in their proper context in a chemistry lab. This project is the subject of a chapter in the recently-published book Authenticity in the Language Classroom and Beyond: Adult Learners.)
3. Rules are for impatient people. You need to observe patterns to see what works well and where the weaknesses lie.
4. The best strategy for long-lasting technology adoption comes from running a small pilot, working out the kinks, telling a good story with relevant examples from the pilot, giving people permission and encouragement to find the best uses, and letting them guide their peers.

Stewart Mader is founder & senior consultant at Future Changes. He has led or advised wiki and content management software adoption in large companies, small and medium enterprises, and universities. He is the author of Wikipatterns and Using Wiki in Education, and created the widely-used Wikipatterns.com community for sharing technology adoption strategies.