November 16th, 2009

Resistance to change: The real Enterprise 2.0 barrier

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 10:29 am

Categories: CIO issues, Cultural issues, Enterprise 2.0, Failure 2.0, Governance, IT issues, Project strategy, Research and statistics

Tags: Barrier, Enterprise 2.0, Michael Krigsman

Large organizations continue to embrace Enterprise 2.0 as a viable addition to the corporate business process toolbox. As evidence, look no farther than the rapid growth of The 2.0 Adoption Council, which was founded this past June and currently boasts more than 100 member organizations, each of which has more than 10,000 employees.

Despite clear interest from the enterprise, discussion persists around obstacles to large-scale adoption of Enterprise 2.0 approaches, tools, and methods.

ZDNet’s Joe McKendrick summarized key obstacles in blog post at Fast Forward:

Resistance to change	52%
Difficulty in measuring ROI	42%
Integrating with existing technologies	41%
Security concerns	32%
Budget	25%
Product knowledge	23%
Tools not enterprise ready	22%

It should not surprise us that the top issue is resistance to change. Readers of this blog know that business projects of every kind suffer from issues related to poor communication, conflicting agendas across information silos, and related organizational causes of failure.

A recent study from The 2.0 Adoption Council also describes resistance to change as the significant barrier. This compelling slide clearly summarizes that message:

Read the rest of this entry »

October 9th, 2009

Twitter suspends security researcher's account as a threat

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 7:13 am

Categories: CRM, Cultural issues, End-user impact, Enterprise 2.0, Failure 2.0, IT issues

Tags: Customer Service, Twitter Inc., Product Marketing, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Security, Marketing, Enterprise Software, Software, Michael Krigsman

Twitter erroneously suspended, and subsequently restored, a prominent researcher’s account two months after he tweeted a security warning intended to inform his audience about an imminent threat.

Aside from poor security handling, this situation offers a case study example of immature customer service and suggests problems with the organization’s corporate culture.

Mikko H. Hyppönen, Chief Research Officer at well-known computer security and anti-virus firm F-Secure, discovered that Twitter unexpectedly banned his account without warning. Here’s a screen capture (that I edited for clarity) from Mikko’s blog:

When Mikko complained, Twitter restored his account with this minimal explanation:

I’ve unsuspended your acct.
You were suspended for using the malware URL rnyspeceDOTcom in DMs.
Be careful!
We scan evrythng for malware.

Apparently, this tweet got Mikko intro trouble:

I asked Mikko to share his thoughts on what happened:

Obviously, I was quite surprised about the whole incident. As I’ve worked with Twitter previously regarding Twitter worms and such, I really didn’t expect this. In addition, I wasn’t expecting them to ban me because of a tweet that was actually warning users to stay away from a phishing site. I think their process leaves a lot to be desired.

Twitter did not immediately respond to my request for comment.

THE PROJECT FAILURES ANALYSIS

There are several problematic aspects regarding Twitter’s handling of this matter:

1. Twitter waited two months to suspend Mikko’s account after he sent the “illegal” tweet. A two-month delay responding to perceived security threats does little to protect users.
2. This case has extreme irony because Mikko’s tweet attempted to warn followers away from a major security threat. In addition, his tweet included spaces in the middle of the address, making it non-clickable for readers.
3. For the coup de grâce, the company’s explanation is rude, blames the user, and does not even apologize. In addition, Twitter did not restore any of Mikko’s followers or the people he followed.

One might expect a small, poorly funded startup to exhibit these problems, but that’s not Twitter’s situation. According to Bloomberg, the company is valued at $1 billion, having raised $150 million.

Cute logos and web page illustrations are no substitute for genuine customer service values. If the company doesn’t improve customer service attitudes, its reputation may one day descend to the level of cable and telephone companies: hated utility services that we tolerate until a replacement comes along.

October 8th, 2009

Workday, SaaS, and failure: 'A matter of trust'

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 6:00 pm

Categories: CIO issues, Cultural issues, End-user impact, Failure 2.0, IT issues, Project failures, Project success, SaaS, PaaS, and SOA, Vendor relationships

Tags: Customer, Workday, Outage, Naomi Bloom, Andrew McCarthy, Manjit, Manufacturing, Michael Krigsman

Software as a service (SaaS) vendor, Workday, which sells human resources applications, recently had a 15-hour outage, during which time its system was unavailable to customers. In an unusual twist, this post is about success and not failure.

Background. The story begins when I heard about the outage through an anonymous source. To learn more, I sent out this Twitter message:

Naomi Bloom, a top HR technology and service delivery expert, responded:

Following Naomi’s suggestion, I checked Workday’s blog for details:

[T]he network attached storage (NAS) device that stores operating system files for our production servers detected a corrupted node within a backup RAID array. Rather than simply log the error, which is what it is supposed to do, the NAS took itself off-line. It is ironic that the redundant backup to a system with built-in redundancy caused the failure.

This type of error should not have caused the array to go offline, but it did. The most important result is that our failover plans worked as expected. Within hours, all customers were live in our secondary datacenter with all their data intact.

Workday gets in touch. Two days later, Workday’s Communications Director, Andrew McCarthy, sent me an unsolicited invitation to discuss the outage, even though I previously never had contact with the company.

The note caught me off-guard because it’s the first and only time a vendor has reached out to me proactively following a failure. I’ve written almost 750 blog posts related to IT failure, and Andrew’s invitation is unique in my experience. Here’s the full text of that email:

Read the rest of this entry »

October 3rd, 2009

Various Google sites are down

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 4:58 am

Categories: Enterprise 2.0, Failure 2.0, Google

Tags: Google Inc., E-mail Providers, Cloud Computing, Internet, Michael Krigsman

Various Google properties seem either down or too slow to be usable right now. These include Google.com search, Wave, Gmail, Apps, FeedBurner, and YouTube.

I asked Twitter users for their experience:

And received back these responses almost immediately:

Interesting to note things seems fine in Rome. Meanwhile, apologies to anyone receiving late email replies from me — now you know why.

Update 10/3/09 8:07AM EDT: Google seem back up and working normally now.

September 21st, 2009

Are Twitter direct messages safe?

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 6:03 pm

Categories: CIO issues, Enterprise 2.0, Failure 2.0, IT issues, Security and privacy

Tags: Twitter Inc., Michael Krigsman

A twitter colleague sent me a direct message that apparently ended up in another user’s mailbox. This error suggests that private information sent on Twitter could be exposed to non-intended recipients.

Here is a screen capture of the private message, annotated according to the following legend:

1. Recipient: Susan Scrupski
2. Sender: @zolierdos
3. Intended recipient: @mkrigsman
4. Message text, which I blurred to maintain confidentiality

The sequence unfolded this way: Twitter user @zolierdos sent a private direct message to me. That message ended up in the Twitter account of mutual friend Susan Scrupski. Susan then told Zoli and me that Twitter sent her the private message.

Zoli sent the message using a Twitter client, so perhaps the problem lies there. However, whether due to a Twitter snafu or a third-party bug, this issue raises serious questions about the confidentiality of private information sent through Twitter.

Until this issue is resolved and you can be sure private messages remain confidential, I suggest you adjust your direct message habits accordingly.

Have you experienced similar errors? Let us know.

Update 9/21/09, 11:15PM EDT: Twitter support contacted both Zoli and me to investigate. The company is taking the problem seriously.

Update 9/22/09, 8:00PM EDT: Twitter support says the problem was operator error and not a bug. While there is no way to prove this assertion, I’ve heard anecdotal evidence about direct messages ending up in the wrong hands. My advice: be careful sending sensitive information through Twitter.

August 31st, 2009

Debunking Enterprise 2.0 failure

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 11:48 am

Categories: CIO issues, Cultural issues, Enterprise 2.0, Failure 2.0, IT issues

Tags: Solution, Enterprise 2.0, Dion Hinchcliffe, Paula Thornton, Sameer, Enterprise 2.0 Technology, Michael Krigsman

As part of a series of guest posts, I asked Enterprise 2.0 thinker, Paula Thornton, to contribute a blog challenging assumptions about IT failure. Her post jumps into a discussion with ZDNet blogger, Dion Hinchcliffe, on the subject of failure in the Enterprise 2.0 world.

Paula Thornton seeks to understand human behavior and designing interactions for human expectations as the means to achieve strategic differentiation. This is the focus of our discipline. It is not just nice to have‚ and is not, like documentation once was, an afterthought. It is the means by which to start a strategic discussion and the means by which to drive a tactical initiative. All design should be evidence-based. Follow Paula on Twitter as @rotkapchen.

As someone actively involved in the Enterprise 2.0 community, a post by ZDNet’s Dion Hinchcliffe, called 14 Reasons Why Enterprise 2.0 Projects Fail caught my attention. While I have great respect for Dion, his piece offers overly general advice that will not actually help practitioners avoid failure.

As a commenter on his post clearly states, Dion’s advice is not specific to Enterprise 2.0 initiatives:

To be honest, I think these are pretty broad and apply to most IT projects. Aside from the generic factors, I would challenge the idea that there is a set of common failures that we can boil down to.

Sincere efforts to observe and evaluate what’s happening with Enterprise 2.0, and why, are valuable. But they face a critical challenge, noted by Christopher Alexander, way back in 1964:

Today functional problems are becoming less simple all the time. But designers rarely confess their inability to solve them. Instead, when a designer does not understand a problem clearly enough to find the order it really calls for, he falls back on some arbitrarily chosen formal order. The problem, because of its complexity, remains unsolved. [emphasis added]

Does Dion’s post contribute to solving the problem, or does it fall back on the symptoms of failure? If not unique to Enterprise 2.0, are these symptoms part of a larger problem that isn’t being solved? If smoke, where’s the fire?

Read the rest of this entry »

August 19th, 2009

Social CRM: Shifting power and rapid burn

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 4:51 pm

Categories: CIO issues, CRM, End-user impact, Failure 2.0, IT issues

Tags: Customer, CRM, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Advertising & Promotion, Leadership, Enterprise Software, Software, Marketing, Management, Michael Krigsman

The vague terms “Enterprise 2.0″ and “Social CRM” express a collaboration-centric view of business and work relationships that de-emphasizes traditional command and control boundaries in favor of engaging community.

Inside the enterprise, this philosophy promises the opportunity for workers to pool and share knowledge in exciting new ways, using technologies such as blogs and wikis. Similarly, Web-based software such as YouTube and Twitter let consumers band together, sometimes quite unexpectedly, to form massive, ad hoc influence groups.

These changes hold profound implications for the expression of IT-related problems, which become something quite different from the project-related failure we’ve come to know and love (or hate).

ACKNOWLEDGING CUSTOMER POWER

The mere fact of customers sharing information amongst themselves is nothing new, but the Web lets positive or negative viral consumer crusades arise faster than ever before.

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August 15th, 2009

Twitter is down...again

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 10:16 am

Categories: Enterprise 2.0, Failure 2.0, IT issues, SaaS, PaaS, and SOA

Tags: Twitter, Blogging, Internet, Michael Krigsman

Update 8/15/09 2:15pm EDT: Seems to back up and working now.

Twitter isn’t working yet again and what a pain in the rear. Here’s a screen capture:

I was in the middle of an interesting conversation with top enterprise blogger, Francine McKenna, and a writer for New York magazine when Twitter just stopped working. Although the writer was looking for conflicts of interest among enterprise bloggers, she was barking up the wrong tree in her search. Unfortunately, we never reached a point of resolution when Twitter crashed.

I’d link to the thread, but since Twitter is down, that just ain’t possible.

July 6th, 2009

Enterprise 2.0 collaboration communities: measurement and metrics

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 2:09 pm

Categories: CIO issues, Enterprise 2.0, Failure 2.0, IT issues, Research and statistics

Tags: Customer Service, Collaboration, Social Media, ROI, Enterprise 2.0, Roi/Tco, Product Marketing, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Finance, Managerial Accounting

Many participants in the collaboration / Enterprise 2.0 world offer Kumbaya-style enthusiasm without showing concrete evidence of business value. As an antidote to this substance-free clamoring, Forrester analyst Natalie Petouhoff developed a data-driven framework that systematically measures business-oriented ROI in collaboration communities.

• Related: Enterprise 2.0: The Kumbaya irony

Natalie’s report, The ROI of Online Customer Service Communities, presents an ROI model, discusses the business value and benefits, offers concrete examples, and raises a host of implementation obstacles and success factors.

In contrast to less substantive Enterprise 2.0 discussions, where creating good feelings is the dominant theme, this research adopts a more structured and analytical approach. Although Petouhoff focuses narrowly on customer service communities, many of her conclusions are easily adaptable to other Enterprise 2.0 collaboration deployments.

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June 2nd, 2009

IBM: IT failure and social media disaster

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 9:26 am

Categories: CIO issues, Devil's Triangle, Enterprise 2.0, Failure 2.0, Government projects, IT issues, Project failures, Tools, Uncategorized

Tags: Consultant, Information Technology, Social Media, Customer, Twitter, IBM DB2, IBM Corp., Lois, Michael Krigsman

IBM’s recent DB2 fiasco in the Philippines is a textbook case of Devil’s Triangle relationships causing conflict between a technology provider, third-party consultants, and a customer.

• Related: IBM’s Devil’s Triangle: An enterprise software soap opera

Although the situation is interesting, I never expected it to bubble over onto Twitter, demonstrating poor social media practice in addition to vendor/consultant arrogance.

The Twitter connection began when I tweeted a general request seeking an expert to explain technical aspects of DB2. IBM’s customer, a Philippine government agency, raised questions about DB2’s suitability to task, making the technical aspect relevant:

A consultant with DB2 expertise re-tweeted my request. So far, so good:

An IBM DB2 executive responded with the implication my request was somehow wrong, unethical, or not straightforward. Yes, the tactic definitely caught my attention:

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