Collaboration 2.0

November 24th, 2009

Is Google the Center of the Universe?

Posted by Oliver Marks @ 2:03 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Google Inc., Rupert Murdoch, Jarvis, Wiki, Online Communications, Oliver Marks

It’s not even a year since the triumphalism of Jeff Jarvis’s Google ‘reverse engineering’ book ‘What Would Google Do?’ hit the book shelves, but it seems an age ago now. Jarvis’s publisher Harper Collins claims this book is ‘all about you‘ in their promo blurb - how you can apply Google thinking to your business ideas.

There’s no ‘preview’ available of Jeff’s book on Google books so I’ll have to check it out of the library again when I have time to refresh my memory. (Interestingly Google books front page looks rather like the pseudo retail experience of the San Francisco Central Library, with latest purchases on display for checkout if you can navigate your way past the homeless and unemployed lining up to use the free internet).

Jarvis has been blogging about the ‘Murdoch/Bing sillliness‘ (Publisher Rupert Murdoch’s claims he will block Google from indexing News Corps materials and do a deal with Microsoft, so consumers will have to use their new Bing search engine to find Murdoch owned content) and says this plan won’t work.

He may well be right, but with Wikipedia losing momentum the zeitgeist of the times is changing. From ‘topnews.us‘ (Not a Murdoch title but reporting on a Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal article):

Statistically speaking, Felipe Ortega, a Spanish researcher who analyzed Wikipedia’s editing-history data of almost three million active contributors in 10 languages, noted that in the first quarter of 2009, as many as 49,000 editors of the English-language Wikipedia quit the site, as compared to a net loss of 4,900 editors during the same period last year.

While the Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, the chairman emeritus of the foundation, has acknowledged that participation to the site is apparently declining, the foundation’s executive director Sue Gardner specified that the “easy work” of contributing, as in the “gold rush” early days, has now become a thing of the past!

In a recession like the current one, the curious use of the term ‘gold rush’ by Gardner takes on a new meaning. Maybe some of the ex editors are now at the San Francisco library waiting to use an internet connected computer, having failed to find any gold in their crowd sourced collaboration activities. Was there ever any?

Meanwhile Seth Godin, the normally on point ‘writer, speaker and an agent of change’ blogs pithily

Rupert Murdoch has it backwards

You don’t charge the search engines to send people to articles on your site, you pay them.
If you can’t make money from attention, you should do something else for a living. Charging money for attention gets you neither money nor attention.

Suggesting Rupert Murdoch does something else for a living is pretty hilarious stuff.

Jarvis again:

News Corp. leaving Google would be a mosquito bite on an elephant’s ass, unnoticed by Google or by the audience. For there will always be – as Murdoch laments – free competitors: the BBC and Australian Broadcasting Corp, which he and his son complain about, not to mention the Guardian, the Telegraph, NPR, CBC and any sensible news organization worldwide.

Read the rest of this entry »

November 21st, 2009

Flipping Fantastic

Posted by Oliver Marks @ 9:17 am

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Microphone, Video Camera, Video, Camera, Flip, Flip Camera, Flip Ultra HD, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Oliver Marks

Getting the most out of Flip video cameras

The picture above (a still from a Flip video) is of my venerable old three chip Sony VX1000 video camera, Frezzi light and associated 10 pound battery belt. In the foreground is a Flip video camera.

If you aren’t aware of Flip cameras yet they are essentially high quality hi def video cameras that are small in size but produce very high quality video footage. I’ve lugged that Sony VX1000 camcorder all over the planet in its flight case along with a full size tripod: more recently I’ve almost always got my two Flip Ultra HD video cameras in my lap top bag. Admittedly the VX1000 is no longer state of the art compared to current cameras in its class, but the Ultra HD certainly is. What’s so amazing about Flip video cameras is the amazing quality you can get out of them with appropriate lighting and some control over your location audio. They are very forgiving straight out of your bag but a little attention to detail works wonders as I’ll discuss below.

Flip cameras are an incredibly useful addition to any collaboration toolkit in both private and professional life. These pocket sized wonders are useful in obvious ways - capturing family and friends events and site seeing - but they have much broader utility.

The superb high definition picture quality makes using a Flip more useful than a stills camera since single image capture is easily possible from your footage. Packing a Flip when assessing a physical object, whether a car you’re thinking of buying or recording an issue with a machine for your work colleagues elsewhere on the planet, makes it possible to really look carefully at it afterwards, to see and hear things you might not have noticed.

Archiving this footage in wikis, blogs and content management and other systems is trivial but more importantly greatly extends the use of those online tools in a collaborative context. You can see Flip video everywhere from classic car restoration forums to horse and livestock wikis to oil and gas pipeline maintenance sites …and countless other areas.

Trivial to set up and simple to get going, the one issue with Flip is motion sickness inducing hand held movement. The fundamentals of all filming are lighting, tripod and audio quality, and using a Flip is no different.

Flip make a useful inexpensive bendy leg tripod that should be a must have in your bag for rapid setup. The other extremely useful item to have is a clamp so you can attach your Flip to an object at the appropriate height and distance away from your subject. There are various options for this - I use the ‘Ultra Clamp‘ seen in the picture above which enables you to attach your Flip to anything from bicycle handlebars or your vehicle to a nearby shelf or pipe, and which has the added benefit of a shoe to attach a light. Read the rest of this entry »

November 18th, 2009

AOL/Facebook in the Enterprise

Posted by Oliver Marks @ 10:20 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Facebook, America Online Inc., Shop Logic, Business World, Internet, Social Networking, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Oliver Marks

In 1994 America Online trailed Compuserve and Prodigy, a third subscription option in how you hooked your modem up to the internet to go cyber surfing. What propelled AOL to global dominance by the end of that decade was their proprietary ‘rainman’ platform, which enabled partners to build out their anchor stores in the massive online shopping and lifestyle mall AOL became. Time Warner ultimately bought them with Ted Turner saying AOL was better than sex, and with great swathes of society believing that AOL was the internet, and that anything outside the walled garden was dangerous and disreputable.

We know how that worked out: the internet growing at a fantastic rate as broadband made always on connectivity a reality, and the AOL mall suddenly seeming like a very small and rather dated place. The AOL user experience and the ubiquitous CD rom mailers (decorating countless dorm rooms and burning man installations and serving as coffee mug coasters) is a distant memory now, but I believe what’s replaced it is Facebook.

The one stop shop logic is very attractive to the casual internet user (the non nerd), the social graph is powerful and fascinating and why bother going outside the walled garden when this is where all your friends are? Location, location, location means the similar proprietary applications model to AOL in the last century also means it makes business sense to build on the solid foundations of Facebook land. It’s growing like crazy, is the logic, everyone’s on there and the connections are valuable, it’s the shiny comprehensible side of the vast internet, just like the shopping mall is the focused safe haven in the vast sprawling city.

Even the proprietary messaging service within Facebook makes contact with the ‘outside world’ unnecessary. The business world is abuzz with rumors of vast corporations purchasing Facebook, just like Time Warner swooped for AOL. Against this backdrop, it’s not surprising how comprehensible ‘Facebook for the enterprise’ thinking is attractive, and in fact a walled garden approach can work well for the security constraints companies work within.

Imagine if you’d modeled your business collaboration network around an AOL model ten years ago - as some companies did with the portal approach. It’s very wise to take the longer view when a fashion driven approach to anything seems to take over the world - Myspace and Friendster where huge a few years ago and it’s inevitable Facebook will be superseded.

There is a clear business value in adopting use models from social network services when they serve your specific business needs, but beware the blind adoption model and the fickle fate of fashion…these days an email from an AOL accounts tells the recipient the sender doesn’t ‘get’ the internet…

November 16th, 2009

'The Purpose of a Business is to Create a Customer' - Peter Drucker Centenary

Posted by Oliver Marks @ 1:00 am

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Performance, Knowledge, Drucker, John Hagel, Knowledge Stock, Lloyd, Strategy, Collaboration, Groupware, Management

This month marks the centenary of Management guru Peter Drucker’s birth, and the Harvard Business Review - the Vogue magazine of management fashions - has a terrific section devoted to his legacy and ideas this month. (The paper version is a keeper).

Drucker’s tremendous body of work has been distilled into the usual bumper sticker phrases and ‘ten things’ lists over the years, but the longer form books - ‘The Practice of Management‘ for example - somehow seem to get you thinking in the same way as Drucker, which may partly explain how foundational he is to business thinking.

Packed full of common sense and combined with a strong sense of business’s responsibility to society, two of my favorite Drucker bumper sticker quotes are ‘Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes‘ and ‘There is an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job‘, which somehow seem to fit together very well.

An interesting comparison to the Drucker celebrations are the follow up industry verticals report to ‘The 2009 Shift Index‘, the ‘Industry metrics and perspectives‘ by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison and their associates at the Deloitte Center for the Edge.

The 200 page report systematically examines trends across 14 industries, to further explore by industry why return on assets (ROA) for U.S. public companies has declined by 75 percent since 1965. John Hagel has fleshed out on his blog a summary of the key perspectives emerging from their industry analysis under the following headings:

* Deterioration in performance is widespread
* Advances in labor productivity fail to improve return on assets
* Innovation, at least as traditionally defined, does not appear to offer a solution
* Traditional measures of competitive intensity understate the challenge
* Worker passion is at very low levels across all industries

It’s well worth reading this short blog post as an overview of the long form report to get context.

From the ‘The 2009 Shift Index: Industry metrics and perspectives‘ report:

…Knowledge flows—which occur in any social, fluid environment where learning and collaboration can take place—are quickly becoming one of the most crucial sources of value creation. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media foster them. Virtual communities and online discussion forums do, too. So do companies situated near one another, working on similar problems. Twentieth-century institutions built and protected knowledge stocks—proprietary resources that no one else could access.

The more the business environment changes, however, the faster the value of what you know at any point in time diminishes. (my italics) In this world, success hinges on the ability to participate in a growing array of knowledge flows in order to rapidly refresh knowledge stocks. For instance, when an organization tries to improve cycle times in a manufacturing process, it finds far more value in problem solving shaped by the diverse experiences, perspectives, and learning of a tightly knit team (shared through knowledge flows) than in a training manual (knowledge stocks) alone.

Knowledge flows can help companies gain competitive advantage in an age of near-constant disruption…

Read the rest of this entry »

November 14th, 2009

Understanding Enterprise 2.0 Tolerances & Scale

Posted by Oliver Marks @ 6:18 am

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Environment, Enterprise 2.0, Small And Medium Business Need, European Enterprise 2.0 Scene, Collaboration, Groupware, Enterprise Software, Software, Oliver Marks

We’re at an interesting intersection in the collaboration world where projects both large and small tend to be discussed with the same terms. This can be very confusing to the lay person since it’s hard to know what sort of scale is being described.

Small and medium business needs are typically very different to ‘enterprise’, which in general business usage tends to refer to companies with over one hundred million in revenue. This can also be misleading however since many ‘enterprises’ are in fact federations of autonomous smaller business units.

As I’ve discussed previously, planning at an appropriate scale and for anticipated growth or shrinkage is critical to the success over time of a collaboration environment. It’s relatively trivial these days to set up a ’software as a service’ browser based, pay-as-you-go collaborative environment, and/or on premise wikis, but driving efficient uptake and usage is a much more substantial task.  Technology, while not trivial, isn’t really the issue: culture change is.

I’ve had the pleasure of participating in two Enterprise 2.0 conferences in the last couple of weeks in the USA and Europe respectively, and some ubiquitous patterns have emerged for me from those experiences.

The European Enterprise 2.0 scene is a Ginger Rodgers to the USA’s Fred Astaire: Europeans are doing everything the US is doing but backwards and in high heels, or rather also in multiple languages and cultures. Although English is the lingua franca of international business online, providing compelling reasons to persuade participation in European online collaboration can be culturally more challenging than in the English speaking US and UK.

(Asian cultures, with fundamentally different language character sets on top of huge cultural differences, are an order of magnitude more complex… but that’s the subject of another post).

Like the San Francisco Enterprise 2.0 conference, the Frankfurt Enterprise 2.0 Summit was mostly a gathering of the faithful, with a few curious attendees exploring the business potential of applying whatever ‘Enterprise 2.0′ is. While sophistication and understanding of the nuances of the current state of the 2.0 nation has great value, the bigger, simpler picture can be very illusive to the (hopefully) intrigued bystander, and this can be made far more confusing by failure to understand concepts of scale.

One minute we’re talking about a few agile wikis, the next Sharepoint as a platform or a substantial Jive SBS or Telligent environment. Our intrepid exploring bystander’s background may be a small entrepreneur, a ’single silo’ medium sized business, a representative from a small department of a large company, a global business exec tasked with joining multiple silos for greater awareness and efficiency, or any number of other variations. Each use case is very different, and while the technologies selected to solve specific business issues may have a commonality, the context of their application will be crucially different.

The collaboration challenges of a small sized business are likely to be fundamentally different to the needs of an enterprise division: some of the homogenizing evangelistic E2.0 enthusiast language encouraging adoption can be dangerously misleading. Successful collaboration by definition touches most parts of a company or unit - that’s the whole point - but tailoring a perfect fit for needs is vital. Loose off the shelf framework application or emulation of something that seems to have worked in another company fails to understand the tight tolerances required in any high performance machine operating efficiently, to use an engineering analogy.

Mature larger companies are often akin to large cities. Los Angeles or London for example have grown over time to consume and incorporate the towns around them, forming a complex network of places within a greater whole. The navigation systems connecting this urban fabric develops to match the travel patterns of inhabitants. Enterprise information architects in equivalent large companies should be like town planners watching traffic patterns closely and anticipating need.

Small business is in contrast often like a single campus community, hopefully rapidly growing and feeding off its surroundings. The commonality is broadband internet connectivity, which like the transport options connecting small campus to large city makes all sorts of interesting collaboration possible. Add in the realities of globalization and associated clustering of business entities and it’s easy to see why the concept of business ‘performance fabric’ is seen as a critical collaborative trade competitive advantage.

Helping planners of collaboration understand these concepts is vitally important to prevent the adoption of milquetoast tentative pilot schemes, which are typically experiments to try and find business value through experimentation.

Peter Drucker, the brilliant management guru who defined the term ‘knowledge worker’, was clear these employees or partners couldn’t be controlled but must instead be motivated and given integrative collaboration environments to excel. Common goals, values and sense of purpose empower them to succeed on their own terms.

As an advocate of decentralization and against ‘command and control’ management, Drucker was clear knowledge workers would collaborate effectively as a community if driving to specified business objectives. While the new 2.0 technologies realize this and facilitate execution, strategic planning in many cases lags behind broadband application development and are not aligned with Drucker’s clarity of thought.

November 8th, 2009

Arguing About the Collaboration Toolkit: Cisco's Enterprise Collaboration Platform

Posted by Oliver Marks @ 11:27 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Cisco Systems Inc., Tool, Productivity, Oliver Marks

In the aftermath of last week’s San Francisco Enterprise 2.0 conference there’s been some lively debate about what constitutes ‘2.0′, including some great comments on my previous post.

Meanwhile Cisco have literally just announced their Enterprise Collaboration Platform, which will be broad set of new tools for instant messaging, e-mail, social networking, videoconferencing, document and video sharing.  John Chambers will present Cisco’s Vision for Collaboration and ‘its power to transform business and the future of work’ online on the 10th at the ‘Cisco Collaboration Summit’.

More on these new developments, which appear to go head to head with Microsoft’s (Live Meeting, Exchange messaging) and IBM’s enterprise collaboration tools when we’ve had a chance to digest the details this week.

This announcement, along with the Sharepoint 2010 launch last month, throws into sharp focus the realities of business users deploying Enterprise 2.0 technologies to solve their problems and increase efficiency.

Where the industrial strength solutions above from Microsoft, IBM and now Cisco are rolled out internally after serious executive level strategic planning and budgeting, agile Enterprise 2.0 solutions are in danger of being relegated to useful gadgets used to do busy work in executive minds.

The reality is that to senior management what tools are selected from the toolkit to solve a problem is the final execution step of a logical planning process. While big ticket items will be expected to perform as advertised, the cute 2.0 gadget syndrome may well render the best of 2.0 thinking invisible to all but operations folks working with them.

This would be a shame because there is real business value in strategising around these more agile and modular concepts, not least around financial cost.

As my colleague Sameer Patel states

The problem is that, in the context of E2.0, there’s little discussion around performance objectives where social computing constructs and technologies can move the needle on discrete but large scale business solutions. Equally bad is that there’s little thought and discussion around the optimal solutions architecture and combination of process + social that can solve large scale problems that keeps the c-suite awake at night. Instead, the discussion is dominated by suites vs. platform debates, more technical gobbldygook (to an executive at least) about feature superiority, endless back-to-the-drawing-board definition debates, and post deployment adoption difficulties that in actuality might not have been so bad had the requisite execution planning been considered in the first place.

A comment on my previous post by Scott Quick:

Quoting you: “…E20 is very valuable for capturing unstructured data,
typically the exceptions to repeatable process. This can be a hard
concept for people to get since it’s highly experiential…”

Let’s debunk that notion for a moment and look at a real world use
case for a moment:

Situation: The CMO for a HUGE athletic apparel/equipment
manufacture located in the Pacific Northwest is given the mandate:
Grow U.S. Sales x2 within 5 years without significantly increasing costs
to the Global Brand Organization. GBO for this corporation is
geographically dispersed, a highly matrix internal organization and
relies on a network of agency partners from a myriad of disciplines. It
across nearly every line of business and interacts with multiple IT
departments.

Challenge: The creative staff that serves the GBO (internal and
external) is awash in unstructured data located on desktops,
departmental servers and outside the firewall on their partners’ IT
systems. Inefficiencies include multiple re-working of final artwork
(labor costs), courier and shipping fees, and missed deadlines for
important product launches.

I won’t dive down into the solution for NDA reasons but the scenario is
real … and several years old. The magic to “selling” this multi-million
dollar software and services engagement was to connect the corporate
imperative to the tactical realities backed by a solid ROI analysis.

The situation for E2.0 implementations haven’t changed. The
consultants just aren’t deep enough into the corporate woodwork to
credibly connect the dots for the execs who authorize the funding.

And from Bob Thomson

…To gain a competitive advantage, you have to deliver something that more innovative or operate much more efficiently than competitors or create better experiences that create an emotional bond with customers.

I’m sure that collaborative technologies can help, but the approach that E2.0 evangelists are using is along the lines of 1) implement the tools and therefore 2) magic will happen. Doesn’t anyone remember what happened with ERP and CRM?

The strategic value of E2.0 lies in its ability to make the value chain work better. I really don’t see how “saving 30% of email messages” is going to do that.

Three hard hitting comments from Sameer, Scot and Bob all focused around realizing business value. One of the challenges around Enterprise 2.0  ‘grass roots adoption’ is that informal usage is effectively below the radar, and worse case scenario used by mid level staff who are regularly moved around and reorganized. To senior execs the technology is often as expendable as office supplies, even if those ring binders actually contain pure gold for competitive advantage. Add to this the usual middle ranks career advancement self promotional behavior and it’s easy to see why in some cases modern Web 2.0 technologies are merely viewed like a free Facebook account with little tactical value by the steerers of enterprises.

Back to Cisco’s announcement: you can bet the new products will be considered as a strategic business solution from day one, just as Sharepoint 2010 is being planned for in countless businesses as I write this. I’m in Germany keynoting the Enterprise 2.0 Summit this week and I’ll be beating the drum for those of us who see the business value of high level strategizing processes around these tools and technologies.

All the collection of tools in the kit have specific utility for the myriad of tasks needed to successfully execute, from large to small. It would be a shame if in the future all the focus is on the tool cabinet rather than how to use what’s in it to the best effect.

Toolkit image from Sears

November 5th, 2009

The Enterprise 2.0 Value Propositions Agenda

Posted by Oliver Marks @ 8:26 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Conference, E2.0, Susan Skrupski, Oliver Marks

Time is Money: Where’s the Beef?
The now biannual US ‘Enterprise 2.0‘ conference is a wrap, but disappointingly there is still little business understanding of what the term means or what the value propositions and benefits are. The general 2.0 suffix is well understood by technology enthusiasts but in the world of the enterprise - or small and medium sized businesses - it’s still hard to deliver an understandable and memorable Enterprise 2.0 elevator pitch proposition between the 40th floor bar and the hotel lobby.

The Enterprise 2.0 conference was co housed with VoiceCon at San Francisco’s Moscone’s center and the unified communications/telecomms crowd attending that event, in my admittedly small sample, had little idea what E2.0 was all about. This is a major problem. Dennis Howlett posted an entirely reasonable ’smell test’ - ‘Enterprise 2.0: what a crock‘ back in August here on ZDNet and failed to find much in the way of compelling business propositions. You can bet that Dennis’s view is kindly compared to most naysayers, who in North America might bellow ‘Where’s the Beef?‘, having been brought up on clear advertising propositions like the brilliant 80’s Cliff Freeman Wendy’s hamburger TV ad that question is from.

Vendors pay large amounts of money for their booths, people fly and pay considerable amounts of money to attend in an appalling economy, but the succinct value propositions they are ultimately looking for and which will drive market growth are in alarmingly short supply. The good news is this is a rapidly evolving space which will definitely be an important pillar of competitive advantage for post recession business growth, so long as value is identified and unlocked.

Putting my cards on the table, I’m a consultant with lots of internal experience making collaboration work inside large organizations both as an employee and as hired hand: our goal is to make money as a result of helping companies make large profits due to enhanced collaboration efficiencies. I’m heavily involved with the Enterprise 2.0 conference as an advisory board member.

The reason for a conference like E2.0 is to grow the market for vendors and the associated community in the space by demonstrating business value. The ‘what’s in it for me’ value proposition - the ‘where’s the beef?’ question - is unfortunately highly contextual. The executive business strata level I operate at is not interested in the mechanics of how you deliver value, they are interested in what that value is, when it will arrive and how to measure it.

An analogy I sometimes use for collaboration using Enterprise 2.0 is a commercial restaurant. We open tonight expecting 500 customers: we have a menu of 8 possible entres: 2 fish, 3 meat, 2 seafood, 1 vegetarian. A commercial kitchen’s tools and technologies are analogous to hi tech collaboration  - you could do all sorts of brilliant things in and with it but the goals tonight are those tasks. So why is that guy over there cooking spaghetti on his own stove and talking loudly about what a great chef he is with his colleagues? If it’s your restaurant you’ve got plenty to worry about - is there enough Salmon?, will the rain mean slow trade?, what’s going on with the plumbing? - without dealing with the washing up guys who have gone freestyle as chefs with the ingredients.

This comparison may run counter to the knowledge of Enterprise 2.0 sophisticates, but it’s a common fear from business users assessing the value of trying E2.0 techniques, and an example of the outsider’s perspective. A solid E2.0 strategy will drive to execute explicit business goals enhanced by practical new methods. Taking into account legal, compliance and enhancing existing software (and extracting additional value from it) are all vitally important considerations.

The E2.0 space is still dominated by kitchen sales and chefs, with relatively few enterprise scale restauranteurs showing much interest, to continue that analogy.

Collaboration comes from ‘co-labor’ and that is the heart of the enabling E2.0 technologies, but organizing that labor with evidence of improved results is arguably the achilles heel of E2.0 as a movement. My colleague Sameer Patel and I ran a track tightly focused on extracting business value from an executive perspective. We started with a three hour workshop which followed a journey from collaboration concepts, through selling the business idea roadmap to management, through launch and into user uptake strategies. The other three sessions were ‘Collaboration at Scale’ with Cisco SVP Alan Cohen and Cordys Chief Strategy Officer Jon Pyke, where we explored the challenges of large scale interaction, A session on ‘ Lowering Customer Service Costs Via Social Tools’ and a final panel on Launching Winning Products in the Market: How Social Software Improves Your Odds which focused on innovation. I’ll drill down on these sessions, as I’m sure Sameer will also, in a separate post - our intent was to reach some cumulative conclusions.

For the Boston June conference earlier this year Stowe Boyd and I organized the ‘Open Enterprise 2009‘ research and award, which was won by Booz Allan Hamilton’s Hello environment, after extensive discussions with a broad cross section of the space. Susan Scrupski has done a marvelous job since then in setting up the ‘2.0 Adoption Council‘ (whose pin badges and cloth bags seemed to be everywhere at the conference) and awarded an internal evangelist of the year award to Claire Flanagan, who is CSC Sr Manager Enterprise Social Collaboration.

(The 2.0 Adoption Council is a private community of internal Enterprise 2.0 evangelists inside enterprises who have 10k+ employees)

At issue for me, as we touched on in my video discussion with Andrew McAfee yesterday, is that middle ranking employees dominate the conversation on an operational level around the enterprise 2.0 event. The conversation is valuable and needed, but as I’m acutely aware it takes a strong constitution to embark on change management (at more levels than most people realize) inside an organization without clear understanding and strong air cover by and from execs. The ‘chefs’ are frequently brilliant people performing at a very high level but at risk from politics and lack of well defined overarching business goals to drive towards. Read the rest of this entry »

November 4th, 2009

Andrew McAfee & Enterprise 2.0 conference

Posted by Oliver Marks @ 10:59 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: McAfee Inc., Enterprise 2.0, Conference, Oliver Marks

A very busy week in San Francisco at the inaugural West coast Enterprise 2.0 conference, which has proved very successful so far.

I’ll write a longer post after the conclusion Thursday, but for now here’s a brief video discussion between myself and Andrew McAfee about his new book, ‘Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges‘ which is finally available, and the conference.

We discuss the strengths of the event - the evangelists and middle ranking employee success stories - but also note the need for impressing on senior ‘C’ suite decision makers in organizations the business value of these modern ideas and associated technologies.

My track with Sameer Patel this week ‘Selling the Case for Accelerating Business Performance with Enterprise Collaboration and 2.0 Technologies‘ is intended to assist employees with making the internal case for budget and resources to roll out collaboration initiatives, and has been well received.

It’s going to be interesting to see how this fast moving space has changed and hopefully grown by the time the June 2010 event in Boston is held…

November 1st, 2009

Corner of Bar vs Corner of Library: The Twitter Conundrum

Posted by Oliver Marks @ 12:54 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Twitter Inc., Marketing Research, Marketing, Oliver Marks

On the eve of a couple of international Enterprise 2.0 Conferences, I’m revisiting in this post a core concept about the fundamental dichotomy of behavioral patterns around marketing people and business operations people.

As a general rule the people running the strategy and tactics of companies rely on a trusted cadre of advisors and keep their cards very close to their chest: their decisions have implications for internal head count and of course external competitive advantage.

Successful marketing people seem to work in the opposite way - they seem to know everybody and can work a room like their life depends on it.

Where the operations person may be deep in strategic thought in their library, the marketing person is likely to be at the corner of the bar at the watering hole of the moment, schmoozing multiple acquaintances new and old.

(Business operations people, I’m about to mention Twitter but please keep reading, and don’t roll your eyes into the back of your head like that).

For 2.0 technology conference goers who are paying attention it’s easy to see how these admittedly stereotypical extremes would react to modern communication tools such as Twitter and collaboration products.

The average Jane in the street however has little concept of all this as she goes to work with a laptop full of documents she needs to email out as soon as she gets online.

The mainstream media buzz around the usage of Twitter is heavily torqued towards the marketing Joe above.

i covered this topic back in June with a post titled ‘Collaborative Networks vs Social Networks‘ about the problems those two groups solve - they are very different.

(The tsunamai of inanity you can get hit by daily on Twitter is outside the scope of this post and to be fair a conceptual achilles heel for any business user).

Marketing people need to create awareness, and that particularly includes themselves. Having a zillion Twitter followers is a currently a fashionable badge of honor and evidence of being the most connected guy in the global bar.

The operations gal, on the other hand, is much more circumspect about who she gives her business card too, and by extension what the utility of Twitter is.

A successful enterprise 2.0 collaboration environment that’s delivering value across a large organization is likely to be carefully segmented into ‘need to know’ chunks of information served up by your user name and password (beyond general information of course).

In marketing meanwhile any publicity is good publicity, including behaving like a fairground barker online (Twitter is the new TV home shopping network for these people, complete with the trademark gushing insincerity and energy levels).

It’s not hard to see from these comparisons why enterprise 2.0 as a whole can be a confusing concept for most people to grasp. It’s therefore very important for good marketing people and sophisticated operations gurus who have their information antennae tuned to demonstrate intelligent use patterns that are genuinely useful in business (ie they improve efficiency and awareness and make money).

The photo caption of this English  ‘the power of tweets‘ story says it all: ‘AA Gill’s column about how he shot dead a baboon to get a sense of what it might be like to kill a person caused a minor Twitterstorm‘.

I mean seriously, if you weren’t a Twitter user and couldn’t see any value in it for you, wouldn’t that line alone make you make a mental note to avoid at all costs: career death, etc?

Too much free time, naval gazing, hedonism and stream of consciousness don’t play out well in a recession, but demonstrating business value does.

Let’s make sure we focus on delivering that and avoid the regrettable egofest excesses of the last year or so with marketers confusing lightweight tactical viral marketing with heavyweight business strategy.

October 28th, 2009

Jive hits SBS 4: SharePoint in Rear View Mirror

Posted by Oliver Marks @ 11:28 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Microsoft Windows Small Business Server, Mobile, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Corp., Collaboration, Groupware, Content Management, Productivity, Enterprise Software, Software

After last week’s announcement of SharePoint 2010 by Microsoft, with a scheduled arrival date of second quarter 2010, Jive Software announced their ‘Social Business Software 4‘ yesterday at their San Francisco ‘Jiveworld‘ event.

It was interesting to contrast the huge Vegas Microsoft unveiling with this far more customer centric occasion - one of Jive’s signature characteristics is their close ear to the ground for what their customers need.

Today’s Jive event was part celebration, complete with a wonderfully creative ‘keynote’ performance by slam poet Rives, video DJ’s at breakfast time and a degree of pride on stage for how far the company has come.

Having just secured another round of funding to ‘double down’ on development, and with major releases planned at six month intervals over the horizon, Jive are a company on the move.

The reality is they need to be, because SharePoint 2010 is going to grow from an 800 pound gorilla to an 8000 monster over the next couple of years and beyond. Jive and other vendors need to be fleet of foot to stay ahead of this juggernaut, staying ahead of the curve with innovations and agility.

This latest release acknowledges the increasing presence of Microsoft in the space with the ‘JiveConnects’ module (which is DocVerse) that turns Microsoft Office into a fully web enabled collaboration tool seamlessly accessible and synced through SBS4. Word, Powerpoint and Excel can now be shared in real time and simultaneously group edited, with tracked changes and intelligent, controllable merging.

The Jive internal rich text editor now allows cut and paste of Office document components - whether we like it or not Microsoft’s ubiquitous document formats are part of our daily lives, and these two advances help to simplify personal workflow.

Mobile - with iphone and blackberry applications, are an important component of the SBS4 package.

“The explosion of social networking onto the mobile phone scene has demonstrated what is possible when you allow people to stay connected, regardless of where they are. Now, mobile workers can connect and collaborate with colleagues participating in critical business conversations, anytime, anywhere.” said Jive’s SVP of Products Christopher Morace.

This of course varies by device, with the iphone offering the richer experience but the poorer cellular service.

There’s some general structural improvements in SBS4: Improved content organization and presentation capabilities, user interface and workflow design, and behind the screens performance, administration, and scalability tweaks and additions.

The modular approach allows SBS4 to be set up for Marketing & Sales, Employee Engagement, Innovation, and Support, with particular emphasis placed on ‘Market Engagement Solution’, which combines ‘buzz monitoring’ metrics tools with internal and external collaboration tools which enable a unified ’social media marketing strategy’.

The new bridging module gives controls and capabilities to pull high-impact content from the public conversation on the web inside for team discussion and collaboration, and then responding to customers by posting all or part of the discussion back to the public community.

All these shiny new features are excellent advances and Jive’s rapid pace of innovation is impressive. But as is the case with all enterprise vendors who have been iterating for a few years, there are now customers who deployed way back on 2.0, customers with heavily customized branched environments who can’t upgrade and the various pilot programs that can’t get traction inside companies for political and other reasons.

The price you pay for running a user conference is hearing concerns and grumbles (and of course there’s a value to that also for all parties) and I heard a few of those today. Kudos to Jive for putting the event on and also running their various user collaborative sites to both enable dialog and to monitor the pulse of their users.