July 8th, 2008
Broadcast or communicate?
When the Czarist autocracy was overthrown in the 1917 Russian revolution, fundamental changes in Russian society under the new political structure occurred.
A fascinating example for me is that while most of the world was busy building out telephone communications infrastructure, the Soviets chose to focus on installing loudspeakers everywhere.
The goal of course was to tell the proletariat what to think; telephony throughout the old Soviet block era was limited and frequently bugged.
Later in the last century email swept the world, creating another wave of huge change in the way we communicate.
Email in the enterprise is closely monitored and lives forever – the ‘paper trail’ it leaves is valuable for legal discovery and disciplinary action.
However, in large enterprises many people believe their email is being read or bugged by management.
The result, whether management is eavesdropping or not, is that people are very careful what they say in large companies and avoid communicating contentious information by email, even speaking in code words.
It is therefore increasingly questionable how much useful information can be retrieved if the searchable content is bland and noncommittal.
The more cautious the formal communication, the more powerful the ad hoc ‘offline’ collaboration circles become.
One of the major challenges of implementing modern collaboration technologies inside the enterprise is enabling transparency that brings these circles back into the center.
Clearly some proprietary information should be tightly controlled and guarded, and providing satisfactory legal access to events and evidence should be carefully thought through.
However, another revolution has swept the world, making it flat.
A key enabler of globalization is communication and collaboration; exponential digital revolution technical advances increase the pace of change at an ever faster rate.
Utilizing the collective wisdom of employees is fundamental to the success of the enterprise. Providing the sophisticated tools young employees grew up with and expect to use for their work, and capturing the invaluable repositories of information from employees nearing retirement is increasingly essential to remain competitive.
For those organizations that chose to engage in arguing between silos while broadcasting information at their employees, a very uncertain future awaits.
June 30th, 2008
Autonomy CEO: Web 2.0 ‘under all the hype, there is something there…’
An intriguing article by ‘meaning based computing’ company Autonomy’s CEO Mike Lynch in today’s Financial Times: Embracing the friend, taming the beast – Web 2.0 in the enterprise.
Autonomy are mature and stable (with a 4 billion market capitalisation), rapidly becoming the second largest pure software company in Europe since their founding in 1996…”on a vision to dramatically change the way in which we interact with information and computers, ensuring that computers map to our world, rather than the other way round“.
Avoiding all mention of Enterprise 2.0, Mike explores the lure of Web 2.0 in the enterprise, making some very cogent points:
…the issue of varying values of information that Andrew Keen brings up in his 2007 book The Cult of the Amateur may be worrying in a consumer context but potentially fatal in an enterprise that makes aircraft or medical equipment, for example. The Web 2.0 generation may be shocked to learn that everyone’s opinion is not equally valid on every subject.
Failing to harness the true value of user-generated content is frustrating but is inconsequential when compared to the threat that some Web 2.0 approaches can pose to an organisation’s reputation and brand integrity. Blogs in particular can represent a significant risk if information dissemination in public forums if not regulated properly. A violation of the US Fair Disclosure Regulation and the UK Listing Rules for example can cost a company dearly whether accidental or not. Indeed, an employee revealing sensitive and material information about the company in a public forum or blog is liable, along with the company, to prosecution for selective disclosure. Such media can also unleash bullying and harassment issues.
Now clearly Mike is arguing for his company’s products and services here - ignoring the fact that Enterprise 2.0 seeks to address the above issues - but these are the sort of cogent and realistic points I really enjoy.
from Autonomy’s Frequently Asked Questions:
At its core, Autonomy’s technology can understand any form of unstructured information, whether text, voice or video, and based on that understanding perform automatic operations on the information, such as powering the world’s leading enterprise search engine, automatically suggesting an answer to a call center operator, profiling millions of documents for a legal case, or monitoring television channels for intelligence agencies.
Because of the broad applicability of Autonomy’s technology it is not easily shoehorned into a single market category, and in this regards is not simply a search engine, a knowledge/document management company or a retrieval company. At the same time Autonomy has been acknowledged as one of the world’s leading technology companies, and is the clear leader in enterprise search according to all industry analysts.
and
“What problem does the technology address?” Autonomy addresses the very simple problem of an exponential increase in the amount of unstructured information. The problem is universal to all enterprises, regardless of industry or private/government, and virtually every business unit within those organizations. The problem is driven by the exponential growth of unstructured information, which is being generated by an almost limitless number of sources, such as the Web, word processing documents, emails, pdf files and a whole new generation of digital communications.
It’s refreshing to hear Mike state guarded enthusiasm for aspects of Web 2.0 in his financial Times piece:
…these risks should not discourage organisations from introducing Web 2.0 approaches. Next-generation solutions are available to help enterprises organise, manage and regulate user-generated content in a secure, consistent and scalable manner to ensure that employees benefit from instant access to relevant information and that brand integrity is properly protected.
Such solutions bring conceptual understanding and an unprecedented level of automation to content management and address liabilities by continually reading entries, spotting problematic content and removing it in real-time. In addition, they can automatically reconcile tags that differ but are close in meaning, or actually provide the level of specificity needed in the enterprise that social methods struggle to deliver.
In my view Autonomy are addressing the tsunami of unstructured and unorganized information consuming enterprises from a content management system search perspective. Like others in the CMS space they are beginning to explore the allure of the lighter weight world of ’social networks, folksonomies, wikis, blogs and other communication tools” that Enterprise 2.0 provides.
When these two worlds start to move closer together we are really going to have a powerful force for change; for me this is a very encouraging article.
June 30th, 2008
Conferences as conversation starters
Ten years ago Comdex - the gigantic Las Vegas hi tech conference and show - was reaching its high point. In that pre broadband internet era of CD ROM’s, beige boxes and Windows 95, tens of thousands would converge on Vegas, stay in massively marked up hotel rooms and walk the haloed isles. Even as these eager conventioneers were stuffing bags with hundreds of color brochures, business cards and hokey promotional trinkets as they watched the booth jugglers and babes, web 1.0 brochure style web sites were being crafted around the world for the ‘cyberspace surfing’ (remember that?) generation that was rapidly gaining critical mass.
The web ultimately superceded the mega show because information gathering became more efficient and fluid online. It took time to read all those brochures and then try to stay up to date… The same fate befell the giant E3 computer games show for essentially similar reasons. Today there are no peak industry moments, now we have a continuous torrent of information.
Pre Y2K, Comdex and E3 were the place to be, both to gather information and to meet and deal. Interestingly smaller industry conferences are very successful, but a lot of the important wheeling and dealing goes on in hotel suites near the show floor by people who are never at the show. There is no question that human nature being what it is, nothing replaces real world interaction between people, particularly to seal business deals.
Channel negotiations and business deals aside, many conferences are attractive for gathering consensus in vertical industry spaces, an important form of collective collaboration. The web 2.0 movement is a good example of this, but some would say conferences in this space are more an opportunity to congregate and take a snapshot of a moment in time in a rapidly changing world, rather than to formulate new thoughts.
What’s intriguing to me is that increasingly the online conference community back channel, Twitter and blogs are as important as the live presentations at conferences. Frequently the discussion is more lively online than onstage even as a session is running, and sometimes online and live merge with questions posed electronically being discussed on stage.
Just as Comdex was superceded by the web I suspect we are on the cusp of online conferences - complete with community spaces and video communication - really taking off. Ironically it’s difficult to cater to the wifi demands of a conference hall full of uber nerds, but if they are all communicating and collaborating from their known good ‘home’ connections the quality of connection should be excellent. Most conferences these days have video of the keynotes streaming live and then subsequently posted online, and by reading blog posts, Twitter hashtags and pres summaries it is possible to pull together a good representation of the conversations.
Tweetups plus Britekite, Dopplr and other online locators increasingly allow us to connect with cohorts and thoughtleaders for face to face meetings when we are in the same geographical location. As airfares rise, digital video quality and utility is also increasing. Collaboration is increasingly continuous - rather than piecing together a conference you couldn’t attend from online fragments, wouldn’t it be great to participate in real time online? To be able to attend the sessions that you’re looking forward to, contribute as well as learn, and get a lot of other things done in your life, plus get other work done that day as well? The added value is in kicking off conversations in community spaces and wikis that could continue long after the ‘conference’ component is over.
The reality is likely to be a hybrid of venue based and online, but I wonder what a ‘conference’ will be in another ten years?
June 24th, 2008
The view from the trenches…
Taking a pragmatic approach on collaboration 2.0 strategy and tactics, here’s an example of some realities from a client side perspective.
This post is about what it’s like inside a large enterprise running a collaboration system. I’ve been on both sides of the fence during my career: working within large and small software companies, in marketing and consulting, and in both small and large enterprise management rolling out objectives.
Lets start with a crude punch list of typical big company characteristics:
• Big companies are conservative and slow moving: even pushing the wheel hard right will make the supertanker turn gradually. They are therefore focused like hawks on more agile players in their space, anticipating where they need to be heading for on the horizon..
• Big companies are paranoid about their data and constrained by legislation in the countries they operate in, and even some they don’t…
• Big Companies have powerful security officers to ensure compliance to external and internal regulation including email discovery…
• Rigid (and company readable) email clients/Blackberry, telephone and asynchronous Microsoft Office documents are the big company lingua franca…
• Big companies are typically comprised of multiple silos, each of which has constantly mutating yet interrelated business objectives…
• Silo inhabitants are often feuding both internally and with other silos, and sometimes build out incompatible infrastructure to protect their turf…
• Big companies are constantly adding and shedding staff to respond to changing objectives, and planning prevention of intellectual property security bleed by leavers…
• Big company management is risk averse and will defer decision making upwards if they feel their role is threatened…
• Big companies have powerful but often understaffed IT departments that have to keep expensive legacy systems working…
• Publicly traded big companies are very focused on making the next quarter’s predicted numbers…
• Big companies are sitting ducks to get sued…
…Obviously there are lots more items that could be on this basic list but this sets the stage…please feel free to add more relevant examples in the comments…
Counterbalance against this the attractions of Enterprise 2.0, many of which are being informally adopted by employees at big companies so they can get things done, despite the constraints outlined above.
While the barriers for Enterprise 2.0 formal adoption seem low, the above illustrates the entrenched bureaucratic processes that modern agile techniques and software seek to augment and /or replace as appropriate.
The sheer inertia of the processes and tools currently in use to meet objectives can make it tough to formally switch gears. Informal low budget/below the radar uptake is increasingly common to transcend the above limitations, but ‘official’ formal strategic planning using coherent tactics is still relatively rare.
There is of course much consideration of currently fashionable social software, reading of (great) offline books such as Clay Shirky’s ‘Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations‘ and conference going to explore what the next big thing is.
However, the hard work of formally relieving the email and document iteration exhausted troops in the field is slow in coming. Informally these troops are using online tools on an ad hoc basis because they see their value in getting their job done.
I’ve previously discussed here the reality that they are using web 2.0 tools routinely in their ‘real’ life outside work: why, they reason, not just grab their enterprise equivalent to get their job done more efficiently?
Formal executive management planning is often tactical, piecemeal and subject to change. A lack of formal adoption can cause software try outs to spring up within silos that don’t scale and ultimately paint solutions to other business problems into a corner. Although the software adopted is often cheap or free the associated business processes can be expensive and hard to change.
Appropriate formal patterns and processes that fit the needs of specific enterprises are badly needed in order to execute the promise of Enterprise 2.0: agile, efficient and economical solutions that increase efficiency while meshing well with existing infrastructure.
While a centralized approach can seem counter to the spirit of Enterprise 2.0, a well planned infrastructure will allow the freedom to collaborate and grow organically along preconceived expandable paths.
Surprisingly often software adoption takes on a mutated life of its own in the enterprise…design and construct the house and then figure out what the details are, don’t start with a cooker and then build out around it…
June 22nd, 2008
Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server: a next generation of deeper, wider content silos?
The ’shoot out’ between Microsoft Sharepoint and Lotus Connections, two juggernauts in the enterprise space, played to a packed audience at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. The two companies went head to head, squaring off with product demos.
I chose to instead attend John Pironti’s ‘Threat and Vulnerability Management in the Enterprise 2.0 World: How to Understand Where You Are Really at Risk and the Most Effective Ways to Protect Your Enterprise 2.0 Environments’ session which occurred in the same time slot. I figured there would be a great deal of post coverage of the Microsoft/Lotus square off which I could parse at a later date, and this has proved to be true.
Back in April, during the San Francisco Web 2.0 show week, I attended an AIIM Enterprise Content Management system event in Burlingame California called ‘Collaboration vs control - the Sharepoint effect’. I blogged about this back then, noting….
The reality seems to be that no one really knows what Sharepoint actually is, but no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft, or so it appeared talking to many people this morning. 100 million Sharepoint licenses have been sold so far and MS are on track to sell 7.5 million more this year according to Dave Martin, a product manager at EMC during his presentation about fusing Documentum to Sharepoint. (A huge industry has sprung up of vendors offering to add dod 5015 records management retention functionality, moss integration tools, archiving of content outside the Microsoft sql server 2005 format and many other ways of focusing functionality).
This enterprise behemoth is at the heart of countless silos: Gartner commented ‘uncontrolled growth of Sharepoint content may result in compliance, storage and user issues’. It’s not going away: the challenge is in how to embrace and extend the core functionality to allow flexibility and therefore utility in modern enterprises.
Projecting ahead, I’m attempting to parse Microsoft’s strategy. For those in Lotus/IBM world it’s not too hard to see where that supertanker is sailing: over time enterprises whose backbone is Lotus Notes will eventually upgrade to Lotus Connections to take advantage of adequate collaboration capabilities. This will probably not occur for many years based on the caution and budgets of most IT departments.
The road ahead for SharePoint users is less clear. The partners and front end providers for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS), which is built on top of Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) continue to build, with some excellent contextual products signing on, notably Atlassian’s very solid Confluence, a full featured and sophisticated enterprise wiki.
The impression I get, however, is that rather than ‘Partners Betting on Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Social-Networking Capabilities’ as Microsoft would have it on their ‘Enterprise 2.0 Platform of Choice‘ press info page, in fact partners are seeing an opportunity to create a view into otherwise impenetrable SharePoint silos. This demo of Connectbeam’s integration with SharePoint Server (which bizarrely appears to have been recorded outdoors) illustrates this idea.
Some of the next generation collaboration platforms are succeeding precisely because they are silo bunker busters. The problem of dozens of digital filing cabinets full of thousands of iterations of hard to find documents within enterprise environments is arguably being solved by the new generation of nimble project contextual tools. Taxonomies and tagging, threaded discussion, wikis and other ‘Enterprise 2.0‘ tools are an alternative solution to the problem of generating mountains of hard to find silo’d information and associated email.
Microsoft have a fabulously lucrative franchise with their Office suite of Word, PowerPoint, Excel et al desktop products. A huge issue in the enterprise space is blizzards of email containing links to documents created with these products on shared drives, or iterations actually attached to the mail messages. Add mobile users on laptops with intermittent connection and you also have serious synch headaches.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server purports to bring us a next generation ’showcasing social-computing innovation’. I’m not seeing it. A cynic would suggest Microsoft will profit mightily by driving customers with generations of Microsoft files ever deeper into a tangled web of documents siloed in multiple Sharepoint repositories, a maze from which they can never escape. There’s no question records management and retention are an important component of enterprise content management systems, as is discoverable communication for legal purposes. Clearly there is an ongoing huge market for integrating Documentum and other ECM systems with SharePoint.
However, archiving and managing mature content is one thing. Enterprise search is notoriously difficult…the burning question today is how to achieve competitive advantage thorough modern enterprise collaboration techniques and tools. I’ve been attempting to follow Microsoft strategy, and will be fascinated to see how Groove (which was created by current Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie after he left IBM having created Lotus Notes) is integrated into a broader collaboration offering.
Over time it is likely Groove and Sharepoint will offer a flexible synched document management system for Office file users, with a plethora of partner product views into the database content. Given the explosion of new content creation possibilities available to the modern enterprise though - video, audio for example - you have to wonder what life will be like for teams attempting to collaborate using Sharepoint. Uncontrolled growth of Sharepoint content reservoirs could be a major drag on units competing with more agile competitors. Before getting anywhere near planning collaboration strategy, figuring out where all your stuff is located is an essential part of getting organized…
It will be interesting to see how Microsoft ties all their disparate products, including new Flash competitor ‘SilverLight‘, together into a coherent package. It remains to be seen whether this assembly will translate into an effective collaboration platform.
June 19th, 2008
Openness
I’ve been privileged to be around some amazing people recently, first at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston and now this week at SuperNova, Wharton Business school’s conference, which this year explored “how decentralization and pervasive connectivity are changing our world”.
My take away word of the moment is ‘openness‘.
Looking at the beautiful visual and usability design of Firefox 3’s product homepage, which launched in over 45 languages this week, it really hit home for me just how far the open community has come.
Firefox is the defacto browser for those serious about web standards, and increasingly the preferred end user choice. It looks like the world class product it is, from website to product.
At Supernova, a standout session for me was ‘The Value of Openness’ with speakers JP Rangaswami of British Telecom and Consultant Elliot Maxwell. JP spoke about making openness work in large companies, defining the attributes of ‘open’ as:
* open to competition
* open to innovation
* open to being changed or adapted
Jp made a convincing argument that if you keep cost of failures low, big companies (and BT is huge) can be as flexible as small ones….There is a war for talent and competitive value: locked down secretive company processes are over, partnering with talented people who may have multiple jobs the future. How a big company like BT creates assets to innovate is defined by openness, and this in turn successfully attracts the brightest global talent to participate.
Openness has value because of the community it generates: a perfect example of this is Firefox, and increasingly this also applies to enlightened businesses like BT. JP is successfully presenting to his board open source projects which have tremendous value and is setting a great business example of how to innovate while being flexible and cost effective. The tremendous sense of community this engenders in participants may be underestimated by some but is at the heart of successful collaboration.
Although Supernova is a somewhat rarified and idealistic/futurist event, JP’s talk was real world pragmatism - Osmosoft, a BT open source unit, was also represented at the conference and ran a Tiddlywiki community user group later that week at the same venue.
Another aspect of openness was made by Jive Software CMO Sam Lawrence in his blogpost ‘Anatomy of the Enterprise Octopus‘ today. The challenges facing Jive’s prospects are well characterized by Sam - locked down, silo’d work methods make it a misery working in a blizzard of electronic paperwork and email. Sam’s solution is an open collaborative solution - his model “introduces a geographic head to the Enterprise” and is well worth reading.
Sam’s post does a great service to the entire enterprise collaboration community by defining the problems endemic in enterprises. In the spirit of openness neither Jive nor their product Clearspace is mentioned, instead the problems we all seek to solve are analyzed in an entertaining way for the greater community.
Jive have great momentum in the marketplace and are attracting top talent from IBM and other competitors. These people are excited by the opportunity to innovate in an open environment…
It has been proven that open algorithms are more secure than closed ones in the security world, due to security community participation. JP and Sam are C level poster people for evangelizing the equivalent in the enterprise. I know Clearspace intimately from my involvement providing feature recommendations while I was at PlayStation, where everything must be hidden behind the firewall at enormous expense. (Clearspace will run exclusively behind the firewall if needed).
The hard work ahead, for those of us working together in the enterprise collaboration community, is around business process change management. Applying increasing degrees of collaboration and appropriate associated technologies to currently locked down, silo’d enterprises is heavily dependent on a willingness to accept innovation by entrenched middle management, whose job is to ‘make the trains run on time’ and follow existing rules.
The structure of many large companies restrict these middle managers deviating from well worn processes, and in some case actually punish them for innovation. The need for executive level management to get involved in embracing openness for efficiency and profit is great. In some cases, those who are not engaged may pay the price of finding their enterprise unable to compete sooner than they think.
June 15th, 2008
Searching for definition
A recurring theme for me at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston was defining ‘Enterprise 2.0′as discussed in my earlier post.
Based on my conversations with various attendees, some were clearly at the conference expressly to gain clarity on this in order to help them sell initiatives in their company.
Carl Frappaolo, director of Market Intelligence at AIIM, ran a session called ‘Knowledge 2.0′which
‘updated the definition of KM practices and technologies for the 21st century’.
Carl has seen KM go from a circa 1995 buzzword to an ambiguous state today.
‘Some say KM is dead…others point to Web 2.0 & Enterprise 2.0 as the manifestations of KM today’.
Interestingly, a large chunk of Carls’ session was taken up with vigorous audience participation around the precise meaning of ‘Knowledge Management’ (Carl’s definition: “leveraging collective wisdom and experience to accelerate innovation and responsiveness”), and a similar semantics discussion arose around defining ‘Enterprise 2.0′.
The short interview above with Carl discusses that interaction.
My take away from this during the entire conference was that there is ambiguity around what E2.0 is, which is unhelpful for vendors and their potential clients alike. During Carl’s session there was much discussion about Knowledge Management’s fall from grace being primarily due to the ‘huge number of definitions’.
Carl mentioned there is currently a ‘big j curve of interest of Google searches about KM’, so people are still clearly looking for answers, just as they are for ‘Enterprise 2.0′.
At the conclusion of the big keynotes later that day Andrew McAfee, the Harvard professor who coined the term ‘Enterprise 2.0′ in 2006, called on attendees to log on to Wikipedia and edit its definition.
While this is clearly a great example of group consensus at its best, it could also lead to an open ended ‘French cafe discussion’ - as one of Carl’s session attendees called the semantics conversation - ultimately devolving into the political football KM became and which arguably killed it off.
This is in no way a criticism of the event organizers, but it would help a broad swathe of adopters and vendors enormously to align around a consistent definition of Enterprise 2.0 at industry gatherings such as this conference.
It would be great to see the Wikipedia entry for ‘Enterprise 2.0′ quickly become the go-to definition we can all agree on and avoid the ‘variety of different schools of thought’ fate that befell ‘Knowledge Management‘.
June 13th, 2008
Enterprise 2.0 conference ‘Launch pad’ contest winners
Veodia were the victors in the Boston Enterprise 2.0 conference ‘Launch Pad’ contest for up and coming technologies, beating a strong field. Here’s Etay Gafni of Veodia, who recently left SAP to join this promising start up, demonstrating their winning technology with his opinion of why their enterprise video service won….
June 12th, 2008
Enterprise 2.0 Conference notebook
Ironically this week has probably been my most offline in months - Sprint failed the brand new Westin Hotel in Boston disastrously with terrible or non existent wifi service. It was a real shame because Jive Software had an instance of Clearspace for the conference attendee community and there was a terrific back channel for each session sadly only usable by those with a connection. I hope Westin dump Sprint and find a wifi vendor who is serious about service after this experience.
Boston is a great whale spotting location and I saw the Twitter Moby Dick a lot on my iphone, which was frequently my only working device, using the presumably ironically named snail speed EDGE network. Stowe Boyd showed me Twiddict, which queues tweets and sends them when Twitter’s yoyo is in the up position, a useful new browser tool in a maddening situation.
Overall a real shame because people were clearly itching to chime in online during a very solid conference. What does it take to build a strong wifi network for a tech conference in 2008 and why do venues not offer ethernet hubs as a worst case scenario when their wifi networks fail them? I’d gladly settle for ethernet wire spaghetti for a guaranteed connection…
The upside to all this was the slightly surreal situation of being surrounded by the many friends I’ve met online, particularly via Twitter, in real life/meatspace. Often not being able to respond to witty tweets was mitigated by speaking face to face at session end. A great experience and terrific to get to know some wonderful people better over the course of the week!
Security people stars of the show, Powerpoint low point
Monday’s in depth session on ‘threat and vulnerability management in the Enterprise 2.0 world’ with John Pironti of Getronics, and Sean Dennehy and Don Burke of the CIA’s Intellipedia community each shared highly informative presentations.
While John’s session was somewhat general in scope and not specifically focused on Enterprise 2.0, he provided great insight into the realities of the security world. Getronics is a huge 26,000 employee company because the web is a very insecure place. While Web/Enterprise 2.0 doyens are often in adversarial relationships with IT departments, in some instances IT department CIO’s can find themselves in jail if they don’t demonstrate adequate security at audits, a sobering thought.
In the USA, Hospitals, Homeland Security and financial institutions to name obvious examples literally cannot function without IT, with standards that must be adhered to entwined within process and its technology execution - the medical world’s HIPA being a clear example. In a rapidly globalized world this reality is magnified: successfully adopting Enterprise 2.0 collaboration principles within these constraints is contingent on adequate information protection.
The Intellipedia initiative within the CIA is a great example of bottom up collaboration environment building using open source technology in what is an extremely secretive world. For many of us this is great news - it would appear that if the CIA can collaborate within mediawiki to more efficiently serve the taxpayers at a tiny fraction of the cost of behemoth systems there is hope for those battling to build similar initiatives in far less security sensitive enterprises.
Sean and Don should be applauded for their initiative, and may need all the help they can get in the future from the collaboration community with case histories and ROI stories to fend off those whose careers depend on more cumbersome rival systems, as is the case in so many similar enterprise situations. (Spys are still called collaborators in the security world incidentally…).
Sean pleasantly surprised me when I met him the night before their presentation by telling me he had been reading my blog, I hope to conduct an interview in the near future with this great pair of guys. Head spook, I know you’re reading this, Sean and Don are doing a great job!
There were many other strong sessions and highpoints: Dion Hinchcliffe’s ‘implementing Enterprise 2.0′ and Pete Field of Wachovia’s ‘Realizing business value through social networking with Wachovia’, Stowe Boyd’s ‘Web culture and the new ethos of work’ really resonated with me amongst a strong field.
Probably the weakest moments were the generic Powerpoint presentations: Oracle’s Mark Woolen running very long with what many called a blatant sales pitch and Ned Lerner, a director of engineering tools and technologies for Sony Computer Entertainment America, struggling to connect his laptop and get Powerpoint working in front of a large audience, which must have been a very stressful experience.
Ned was presenting slides of the ‘WorldWide Studios’ collaboration environment I ran until very recently at PlayStation, during which he was my immediate superior, so this was extremely familiar information to me.
The high point of the ‘real world show and tells’ was Lockheed Martin’s presentation Thursday morning, another surprise from another security conscious environment. The room was jammed for a very concise discussion of their technology stack, plenty of meaty discussion of planning and process and details of their technology implementation.
Overall a very solid conference, well worth attending. @Trib probably came the longest distance, flying in from Canberra Australia and pronounced the trip well worth it at the closing ‘Town Hall Meeting’.
June 8th, 2008
Do we need “Management 2.0″?
Sue Bushell, who wrote a very thoughtful in-depth Enterprise 2.0 article for Australian CIO magazine recently, has an interesting question within Linked In to her connections: “Do we need “Management 2.0″ and what would it look like if we do?”
I’m looking forward to the article she’s researching, she’s well informed and connected with the knowledge management community…management, of course, is at the heart of organizing successful collaboration.
Having spent the last two years evaluating enterprise software and keeping my eyes and ears open for trends and developments for the specific objectives of my former enterprise employer, I’d like to share a reality:
There are a lot of clever solutions to problems people in enterprise management aren’t trying to solve out there.
Web 2.0 technologies have led a consumer revolution, in which the savvy shopper has never been more empowered by technology. Companies know - and fear that - users can trash their product or service online, providing reviews and propagating it to all their contacts via social networks and online forums.
As I’ve written previously, individuals are interconnected as never before as a result of this technology, and your company infrastructure is being talked about online whether you like it or not. New free web 2.0 services are showered like confetti on consumers weekly, largely in the belief for investors that eyeballs convert to advertising revenue.
This world of interconnected, uncontrolled collaboration that defines user product perceptions is background noise, as are some of the more consumer web focused products and services pitched to the enterprise.
Consumer world Web 2.0 use cases don’t apply to the enterprise, we are trying to solve a very different set of problems.
The enterprise is an ecosphere within well defined walls, and corporations spend millions on IT security to keep it that way. Many of the promiscuous multi source mashups available to facilitate communication are anathema to old school infrastructure technologists for good reason: their goals and budgets are based on protecting information.
Alphabet soup systems IT management is a world of large compendium product purchases as solutions to mature problems. Buying a suite comes with security guarantees/blame the vendor, and overworked IT staff can sleep better at night. Except when the servers go on the fritz…
This new world of enterprise collaboration can seem very threatening with unclear benefits to overworked and stressed IT staff responsible for keeping the corporate vessel afloat. Allowing in what looks like a trojan horse that could spring security leaks is a great way to get an ulcer. No apparent upside, lots of potential to look bad…
Getting IT management around the table with business management to define collaboration strategy and tactics can be very challenging.
Throw in some warring factions, a few silos and a couple of personal grudges around the table and you can find yourself in the middle of a reenactment of first world war trench warfare before you know it!
Defining a framework that enables a holistic solution can seem a far away goal in that situation, but if viewed from the top it is possible and has terrific benefits well worth fighting for.
I’m pretty weary of naming conventions with the suffix 2.0 but do like the idea of management 2.0.
Ironically it appears planning a collaboration solution requires clear leadership and clarity of vision: design by committees slows things down and loses competitive advantage.
Enterprise objectives require both careful consideration - be careful what you wish for - and mapping to viable technology solutions. The challenge is to harness tools to meet your specific objectives in the enterprise, while keeping an eye on the horizon to ensure you are rewarded for adoption and not trapped by it…
Oliver Marks provides seasoned independent consulting guidance to companies on the effective planning of 'Enterprise 2.0' strategy, tactics, technology decisions and roll out. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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