Explaining Twitter, Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 To Your Friends

Posted by Sean Lew on Friday, 29 May, 2009 under General Ranting, software |
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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.

Why is Jive Social Business Software so good?

Posted by Sean Lew on under Collaboration, Innovation, social media, software |
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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.

Business Process Management and Enterprise 2.0

Posted by Sean Lew on Thursday, 28 May, 2009 under Academic, Enterprise 2.0, Information management |
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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.

Total Cost of Ownership for Enterprise 2.0

Posted by Sean Lew on Wednesday, 27 May, 2009 under Enterprise 2.0, Financial, IT strategy |
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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.

The true cost and savings of Enterprise 2.0

Posted by Sean Lew on Thursday, 14 May, 2009 under Enterprise 2.0, Financial, IT strategy |
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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.

Finally…

Posted by Sean Lew on Wednesday, 6 May, 2009 under Academic, Blue Sky Thinking, Enterprise 2.0 |
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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.