Posted by Sean Lew on Thursday, 2 July, 2009 under Academic, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0 |
First of all, I apologize that I have been quiet for almost a month. Some unpleasant things happened and I had to attend to them.
I have been having alot of chats with various parties on collaboration and its really funny how this buzzword has a different meaning to different people. First up, there is no way you can implement a platform and tell people to “collaborate”. A successful collaboration platform is very difficult to achieve however, its failure is generally not well publicised as collaboration platforms generally starts of as a pilot and if it fails, its canned. No pain to the company at all, few thousands dollars went down the drain but a lesson well learnt.
Collaboration is a mutually beneficial and well-defined relationship entered into by two or more parties to achieve common goals. The relationship includes a commitment to mutual relationships and goals; a jointly developed structure and shared responsibility; mutual authority and accountability for success; and sharing of resources and rewards. With this, collaboration is not just technological platform - its just a means to an end.
Interesting enough that one of my close colleague and friend brought up the case that alot of collaboration platforms have failed and its unable to engage the community. This is due to the lack of understanding of the concepts and a overly strong focus on the technology. Technology is important, but just like building ERP solutions and SCM solutions, requirements must be understood! Business culture must be understood! Human behaviour must be understood! Personally, I feel that understanding the specific requirements of collaboration is extremely difficult as its not just the business needs but the individual needs and fit into the overall culture and environment.
Sometimes, collaboration might not be the best option and even if its the best option, we need to understand why various parties would like to participate. Freak success stories like Wikipedia is not going to happen again. That is a Excellent success story but you can create another Wikipedia now and expect it to work with the same success rate. We need to understand the incentives for each party, the responsibilities of each party and many other minor details.
I have reviewed the Enterprise 2.0 implementation success factors post I wrote a while back and I still think the model is extremely very valid. I hope this will help improve the success rates of collaboration platforms across the world.
Posted by Sean Lew on Thursday, 4 June, 2009 under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0 |
Enterprise 2.0 implementation is something that is not very well understood. In fact, there are still heaps of argument on ROI of such technologies. So how can implementors make it easier for people to adopt such technologies? My experience is that no matter how much you focus on the promised benefits and efficiency of Enterprise 2.0, it doesn’t matter. No one understands. Collaboration, social network and all these wonderful terms are just buzzwords to people.
Demostrate the capability to people and get people to understand it. One of my ex-colleagues used to create stuff on our wiki, send an email to everyone with the link to the page and when he gets replies via an email, he would ask the person to post it as a comment. Sooner than he expected, the number of emails he got was falling and everyone started to discuss on the wiki. People then started to realised that version control, discussions, interactivity and collaboration was beneficial. He, on the other hand, has never mentioned a single of those terms to them before he started getting them onboard. He doesn’t believe in the talk.
Have you ever wondered why Enterprise 2.0 initiatives generally starts bottom up? This is why.
Stop preaching, start doing.
Posted by Sean Lew on Friday, 29 May, 2009 under General Ranting, software |
So I have a new way of explaining Twitter, Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 to friends.
When your friends explain to you how great sex is when you were in high school, you never really understand it until you have actually tired it. The same goes for Twitter, Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0.
Posted by Sean Lew on under Collaboration, Innovation, social media, software |
I always knew that Jive software was good. I’ve implemented it (v2.5) and used it before and love it. However, whenever someone asks me why I like it so much, all I could say was “Its so easy and it makes sense”. I have decided to jump into Jive Social Business Software and have a deep understanding why I love it and reviewed Jive Social Business Software extensively.
First of all, I must say I look at Jive from an Enterprise perspective and what I would want if I ran a company.
1) Spaces are fantastic
2) Permissions on Spaces is even better
3) Permissions on individual documents within a space - Wow!
4) Leader in Forrester Wave: Community Platform 2009, Gartner Magic Quadrant, 2008
5) Excellent plugin and API interface
6) Strong community reporting tool
7) Has a document publishing approval process
8 ) User fully customisable front page, excellent widgets (you can create your own widget too - good for the geeks)
9) Excellent notification via customisable RSS, emails and “watching a page/tag” functionality
10) History of where you have been
11) Interesting functionalities on documents like (”more like this page” and “More by Sean” )
12) Video and interactive communication capability
13) Simple project management (I would probably wish that this functionality was stronger so that I could save on buying MS project if possible)
I personally feel that Jive is like facebook and anything else is like MySpace? Or should I say Jive is like a MAC and the rest are like PCs? You get what I mean. You just get it.
Posted by Sean Lew on Thursday, 28 May, 2009 under Academic, Enterprise 2.0, Information management |
I have previously thought that these two concepts do not sit well together as Enterprise 2.0 is freeform and allows users to do as they please. In the world wide web, this could work as there are so many people out there fixing up things that are not right on Wikipedia. However, within an organisation resources are scare and time is money. Organisations do not have the luxury of having a huge army of editors internally to fix up and garden the Enterprise 2.0 platform. If this is a problem, what is the solution?
I personally believe that BPM (Business Process Management) could play a role in this. I am not saying that free-formness should be thrown out of the window. What I am saying is that some levels of BPM could help to improve the quality of the information and data on the platform. The processes involved should enable and not restrict people from editing and creating content. I believe it should be light weight and adaptable to any kind of content as well.
What I envisage is as follows:
1) Generic template for all content created.
2) Content review over time and updates
3) Usage of links and data from other sources
4) Workflows in teams and projects to ensure up to date information
5) Overall manager for each work space and would be held accountable for the space
Does all these make sense? Please let me know your thoughts.
Posted by Sean Lew on Wednesday, 27 May, 2009 under Enterprise 2.0, Financial, IT strategy |
I have been on this topic for ages and I truly believe that this is an answer that could only be answered once I have experienced it. Here we go. I think the total cost of ownership is something that is very difficult to calculate. First of all, alot of the “gardeners” or “champions” I have seen and worked with work extra long hours to ensure that the platform is “nice” and “clean” and still perform their day jobs extremely well. So if effort is invested after hours could we consider this as part of the TCO equation? Some might argue there is a opportunity cost involved and they could be working on real work after hours. But if they are not motivated by their day job scope and prefers tending the “garden” then would they work after hours? I do not think there is an answer to this.
What I have seen is that champions move in and take control of the maintenance of the platform and look after it. All of them have day jobs and generally their day jobs is not affected by their extra work load. IT seldom gets invloved in maintenance other than the standard harddrive replacement, server upgrades and stuff like that which applies to all software that is running in house. These costs can be calculated easily. It seems to me that the human maintenance costs is relatively low as well - as long as you have the right people maintaining it. Do you need a dedicated team to maintain a large Enterprise deployment? Maybe.
I think the TCO arguement for Enterprise 2.0 is still very new and unclear. I do not know all the answers but the above is something I have observed.
Posted by Sean Lew on Thursday, 14 May, 2009 under Enterprise 2.0, Financial, IT strategy |
Buying an Enterprise 2.0 platform is pretty cheap. There are not much complexity in the software or hardware requirements unless the purchasing organisation decides to modify and change things around extensively. Even that, its still not as complex as an Oracle / SAP type enterprise implementation. However, being cheap and easily installed, many people forget the soft costs involved in the implementation.
Enterprise 2.0 is about social networking, collaboration and innovation. Whether it is a bottom up or top down driven implementation, alot of time is required to educate, excite and experience the true benefits of it. Champions have to spend time to educate people and change people’s working mindset and habits. Alot of preaching of the goodness is required too.
So even though an organisation might be paying small amounts of money per user, the amount time time employees spend to push this out into the wider organisation could be quite substantial. This is the communication cost required to get it running. How much would it cost your organisation?
Another thing organisations need to look at is an analysis of the transaction cost and how much savings can an organisation make out of it. I will not go into the theory and concept of transaction costs but there are means to calculate and analyse it even before deciding to take a step into the Enterprise 2.0 platform.
There is never a one size fits all model. Enterprise 2.0 will work for some and not for others. What is discussed above is specifically from the financial perspective only as well. There are many other factors that needs to be considered.
Posted by Sean Lew on Wednesday, 6 May, 2009 under Academic, Blue Sky Thinking, Enterprise 2.0 |
I have been pretty quiet over the past few weeks as I have been preparing my paper for submission to ICIS’09. Its titled “Analyzing the Business Benefits Potential of Enterprise 2.0″. In a nutshell, the aim of this paper is to identify suitable theories which could be used to analyze the potential benefits that Enterprise 2.0 applications hold for organizations.
When I first embarked on this journey to write this paper (by the way, I rewrote this paper 4 times from scratch), I felt I knew all the benefits and just had to link it to theories. I was wrong… extremely wrong. I felt the full force of rigorous academic research and I was pretty blown away. Everything had an explanation, a cause and effect and ultimately a reference. Even though I have completed a few academic papers previously, it wasn’t the same. The research areas that I discussed were well establish areas and it wasn’t difficult to find information to support my reasoning. There were much material ready for me to be used. But in the case of Enterprise 2.0, there was almost nothing!
In this paper, I listed the common Enterprise 2.0 benefits as discussed industry experts and from case studies. I then went on to find an explanation and support for these benefits. If there are any theories that could explain it better and use it as a framework to analyze the potential benefits.
It was an extremely enriching experience and I totally hooked onto understanding Enterprise 2.0 not based on buzz terms and hype. I will share the paper with everyone shortly.
Posted by Sean Lew on Tuesday, 28 April, 2009 under Blue Sky Thinking, Web 2.0, social media |
I spoke to an Asian friend recently regarding social networking in the Asian region and I am pretty surprised that places like China where internet is being censored and freedom of speech is unheard of, there are approximately 220 million just on the QQ’s network. These statistics are for early 2008. TechCruch also reported that there were 376 million QQ users as of April 2009 and just over a year it grew about 70%.
In Korea, with a population of approximately 47 million people, Cyworld, a Korean based social networking site has 22million registered users. This is quite a shocking number of people. In Japan, its a similar case too.
Even though the penetration rates are not as high as Western countries, the dynamics of using social networking in each culture and sub groups can be quite different. For example, mobile phone usage is much higher in Asian countries like Japan, Korea and Singapore and I suspect that there will be more users that would be accessing social networking sites via their mobiles. This changes the way people use such tools for communication. Also in these countries, wireless broadband speeds (3G or free wifi in most parts of the city) are extremely high and streaming videos into mobile devices is a common thing.
I am sure we can learn alot from these countries just by understanding the infrastructure differences, cultural differences and tools differences.
Posted by Sean Lew on Sunday, 26 April, 2009 under Academic, Blue Sky Thinking, Enterprise 2.0 |
This is the description of Attribution Error from Wikipedia
Attributional biases typically take the form of actor/observer differences: people involved in an action (actors) view things differently from people not involved (observers). These discrepancies are often caused by asymmetries in availability (frequently called “salience” in this context). For example, the behavior of an actor is easier to remember (and therefore more available for later consideration) than the setting in which he found himself; and a person’s own inner turmoil is more available to himself than it is to someone else. As a result, our judgments of attribution are often distorted along those lines.
Within a group, this could be in a similar case as well, when the group collectively have a view of the world in a certain way which creates a bias during decision making time. This could lead to groups making less than optimal decisions. Groups could also based on their collective benefits, make decisions in order to benefit themselves.
I am no expert in this area and I have to spend more time understanding the details of this theory. What do you think? Enterprise 2.0, wisdom of crowds and collective intelligence aims to help groups make better decisions. However, attribution errors might explain why some groups can’t make correct decisions. How can we prevent this problem? Can Enterprise 2.0 solve this issue?
