Check out this link. It presents some really good links to Enterprise 2.0 / Web 2.0.
The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research recently released the results on the usage of social media in the Inc. 500. Of note here, “Just over one quarter of the Inc. 500 reported social media was very important to their business/marketing strategy in 2007. That number has increased to 44% just one year later.”
I was speaking to a colleague today and was talking about innovation and enterprise 2.0. “At a high level, one of the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 is constant innovation” I said. He looked confused straight away.
He asked “what do you mean by constant?”
“Well, on a daily basis.” I replied.
He couldn’t understand how innovation can happen on a daily basis (alrite, I might be exaggerating abit here) but I believe its achievable. He said that innovation requires approval to do things in a new way or just doing new things requires business plans, stakeholder analysis, Porter’s 5 forces analysis and the list goes on and on and on. He is right. Big innovation plans requires such forms of analysis. However, heaps of little innovation idea goes a long way too. For example, if a company’s word/powerpoint template has a page that is extremely ink “hungry” as the whole page is filled with the colour blue, for example. No one really notices how much ink it consumes, from the financial perspective, colour inks are expensive, from the environmental perspective, using too much ink is bad for the environment. If this can be picked up quickly just by ONE employee and this employee has a channel to express this idea (Enterprise 2.0 / collaboration platform) and the company takes a new approach to display the same information then the company immediately 1) save money, 2) save the earth.
The above example is also innovation, does it require business plans, stakeholder analysis and Porter’s 5 forces analysis. I believe not. But it has the same outcome, save money. Innovation can come in many kinds. As long as you can save money, increase revenue, improve morale and efficiency, then it meets its purpose. Lets take baby steps and make the world a better place and make your company a better place to be in. Let’s innovate everyday!
Have you heard of this term before?? Nomadic Information Systems is defined when users have access to his / her personal information space from all places independent from specific devices. Some people call it mobile convergence too – similar ideas.
Interesting enough, everything is moving towards a unified view of all data / information. Previously, different devices does different stuff, different software does different stuff, different country uses different standards and the list goes on and on. However, with the birth of smart phones and with the recent and very prominent entrance of the iPhone, one could get everything in one device. GPS, emails, surf the web (which is the whole world in your hands), calendar and entertainment – all achievable as long as you have network connection and battery power.
So what has this gotta do with Enterprise 2.0 and the organisation? I can be quite sure that most companies have different systems doing different things and getting a consolidated view of all the stuff that is going on can be a nightmare, getting a streamlined business process is a nightmare and support for a large number of disparate systems is way to expensive. That’s why IT transformation projects gets approved by the board of directors and some companies spend billions of dollars on it.
Enterprise 2.0 aims to do something similar as well – for a piece of the puzzle. Enterprise 2.0 aims to organise unstructured data. Document manager, wiki, blogs, bookmarks, people, resume, project tasks, timelines and so on. As you can see previously many of the above functions have a specific system that handles it. Now, Enterprise 2.0 can do everything in one place for you (unstructured data convergence). What enterprise 2.0 vendors needs to do is to quickly move on and integrate unstructured data convergence into their toolset. Whether it may be a SAP / salesforce / oracle connector or a business mashup, unstructured data and structured data must work hand in hand.
Well, if you are a vendor and thinking – that’s impossible or its too hard to do, hang on. I know its hard to do and would take a long time. I am just putting up a wish list at the moment. =)
CIO wrote a great article on “Five Great Ways to Drive Your Best Workers Out the Door” Please note that this article talks about your TOP employees and not just the average ones. These are the people you must treasure and try to keep them beside you as best as you could.
Check out the five things that drive top employees up the wall:
Mistake No. 1: Keep the creative juices bottled up.
Mistake No. 2: Micromanage your staff.
Mistake No. 3: Deny new opportunities and challenges.
Mistake No. 4: Don’t listen to your employees.
Mistake No. 5: Change the work environment without considering the impact on employees.
Enterprise 2.0 enables creativity, innovation and improve communication across boundaries and hierarchy. However it does mean that with Enterprise 2.0, the problem is solved, managers need to listen, act on stuff and react accordingly. Its a perspective change or an attitude change and technology is one of the factors in this change.
I told this to a colleague recently. I am NOT evangelising on a enterprise 2.0 software, I am evangelising a new way of working and management. I just happen to be in an IT company so I have to talk about the software to get people interested.
My brother asked me this a couple of months back and I have been wanting to get him an excellent answer. Not just the definition but also the impacts for organisations. Here you go!
I have been looking for credible enterprise 2.0 results and what it has achieved so far, however, its almost impossible to find anything. Its all good that there is a reduction in email conversation and more collaboration but what is the quantified benefits of enterprise 2.0? We must know that it doesn’t mean a reduction of emails will lead to business benefit. The same goes for collaboration. At the end of the day, such forms of benefits must lead to some kind of extra income/revenue or cost savings if not there is no point for organisations to implement such kinds of technology.
I personally believe that Enterprise 2.0 rocks. I have used it and experienced productivity gains and all the various promised benefits of Enterprise 2.0. However, selling an idea / software doesn’t work on “I believe this is the way it works” but depends on the statistical benefits achieved.
We need an in depth study on this. Enterprise 2.0 encompasses many different things and we need to look at it individually to find out what can it provide to improve the bottom line.
Microsoft Word is not my favorite tool for formatting documents and to get the formatting right for Word is a bloody headache. Numerous highlighting and assigning a certain style to it and footnotes, table of contents and references – I should be thinking about the content not how it looks!
I have found my savior! LaTeX! I know its such an 80s software but after exploring for the last 6 hours, I am convinced this is the tool I will use in future. LaTeX is pretty confusing and I must admit and I am still abit lost. There is MiKTeX, ProTeXt, TeXnixCenter, GhostScript, GhostGum in the initial installer, then for my personal purposes, I added, LyX and JabRef. I read a 20 odd page introduction and started hammering (read: typing) an article I am writing at the moment into LyX. If it was a title, I just clicked “Chapter”, if it was a section, then i clicked “section”. I also added like footnotes, bibliography, table of contents and some math formula. It was easy. I just concentrated on my content. Once I was done, I click “View PDF” and I got a perfectly formatted PDF.
Now I know why even my young lecturers back in University days were using LaTeX, its a really good program. I am now an official convert. I believe my Microsoft Word days will decrease dramatically from now on – sweet!
Collaboration is not only for technologists or any special group of enterprise 2.0 enthusiasts. Enterprise 2.0 is for everyone. It involves the technophobic CEO/CFO, the production line employee, the middle managers, back office operations and many others. It includes the Gen Y, Gen X and baby boomers. It includes people from all walks of life and background. In such a case, usability is utmost important. So far, many collaboration / enterprise social software has done well – IBM Connections, Clearspace, ThoughtFarmer has all done well.
However, is usability enough? Well, its very important for sure but there is more. Such platforms manages unstructured data very well but in every business and job scope, structure and unstructured data is being used on a daily basis. I can hear many vendors saying “No worries, we have mashup capabilities”. However, there isn’t a real standard for mashups at the moment. Dapper is a mashup, PageFlakes is also a mashup, Kapow as well. But all of them are different and does different stuff.
What organisations need is a platform that can provide them with excellent capabilities to connect to whatever backend systems, may it be written in Fortran, Cobol, C++ or Java or stored in Sybase, Orcale, mysql or DB2 or connected through WebServices, Java APIs or stored procedures. Whatever it maybe, the mashup platform must provide these capabilities with the collaboration platform. Its must also be easy to create a mashup that anyone with an average understanding of IT would be able to do it.
Why is this important? If an organisation creates such a platform where everyone comes to the same place to work on the same topic and integrating all the structured and unstructured into one place then there is a good chance that organisations can achieve the ultimate benefits of Enterprise 2.0 – knowledge retention, collaboration, streamline communication and innovation.
G'day, Sean here. I am a technology consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers and also a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne and I am working on Web/Enterprise 2.0, information sharing, motivation and benefits.
This blog is dedicated to topics surrounding emerging technologies in the online space, IT strategies and business strategies. Hope you enjoy this blog.
Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent my employer's and/or University of Melbourne's positions, strategies or opinions. I have not been compensated in any way for the content.
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