Enterprise 2.0 deals very well with human communication and unstructured data. People write something and RSS feeds gets send off and others come back with comments and updates. All good. Information is organised into spaces and people work within spaces they are interested in and are allowed to explore into other relevant spaces/articles. Still very good.
However, alot of employees deals with reports coming out from the ERP, CRM and other systems that contains numbers and structured information. These reports requires analysis and deep understanding of the data. So far many of the enterprise 2.0 software does not allow users to collaborate and communicate such information. I think its highly critical for software to start targeting this area of organisations.
Structured and unstructured data is supposed to be together. Its all information and all information should live in the same place. Historically, most systems cope well with one or the other type of data but not both. I think technology has come to the point where we can start doing both efficiently.
How could this be used? Imagine a manager gets a report generated on a regular basis and his team need to rectify some issues in the report or he needs to work on the report for a higher level presentation on business performance of his department or etc… Generally, these tasks requires some levels of collaboration, questions needs to be asked, tasks needs to be tracked, work needs to be done. If the report was generated and posted into the E2 platform regularly and automatically, then registered users can get notified when its up, start working on it and get other relevant people to come contribute as and when required. That will be so much more efficient, the report data is not hidden in the manager’s computer and everyone gets access to the right piece of information – that’s a winner.
What do you think? Should structured and unstructured data live together? (let’s leave the technical questions out for now – I know there are issues in that space but its really more for a discussion later down the track)
Aardvark is a fantastic system. I have been a user since its early days and I guess I have been helping people around the world almost on a daily basis. Aardvark is a system that allows users to ask questions on their favourite instant messenger and it discovers the perfect person to help with any question.
However, a question is not always answerable just by writing a line in an instant messenger. For example, “Should I accept a job offer in a large bank in NYC?” or “how can I increase the performance of my sharepoint server?” Some might argue that these are badly framed questions and others would argue that these are harder questions to answer as compared to “are all apples red?” Whichever the case, there are some pretty tough questions in the world that requires contextual and environmental information in order to be answered.
At the moment, just from my personal experience, aardvark is extremely powerful to answer simple questions and mid level questions. However, the more advance questions doesn’t seem to be answered as efficiently. It could be because there are lesser experts in the area or users could not be bothered to go back and forth to clarify, analyse and answer a complex question or the user could just be busy at that point of time.
I think what Aardvark could benefit from advance questions is to build up a paid service where difficult questions could be answered by paying and users with experience in that area has a greater incentive to answer the question. By matching the “buyer” and “seller”, both parties benefits and aardvark could take a cut of the price and make some money.
With the Australian government promising the build an advance National BroadBand Network (NBN) at an estimated cost of AUD$43 billion, this is an exciting era for Australians. Australia is a country unlike most, its land mass is massive and its one of the least populated country per sq km in the world and this poses a major issue for telecommunication. Even though a large part of the population lives in metropolitan areas, there is a sizable amount of people who are living in rural areas which still requires similar kinds of services. The NBN aims to deliver 100 mbps network to 90 percent of the population and 12 mbps to the remaining ten percent of locations via wireless technologies.
What is even smarter is that the Australian Government has forced the structural separation of Telstra (Australia’s largest telco) and I believe this is for the benefit of the NBN. $43 billion to build a 100 mbps network from scratch across Australia seems pretty little to me and by leveraging the existing infrastructure Telstra has will not only reduce the amount of work that needs to be done and speed things up, it also allows access to talents and expertise in building such kinds of network.
Opportunities from this network will be unimaginable. IP TV, ultra fast downloads, movies, music, high quality VOIP services, video conference, integrated connection with home, office and mobile and many more. The economic impact of the NBN will improve economic growth, quality of life, education, healthcare, environment, and workforce development and many others. Things like improved health communications, smart metering, real time entertainment, quality education to rural areas via telepressence and business communication and technologies like VOIP, video conference and SaaS will all be possible with the NBN network.
This program if successfully completed and delivers its promised speeds, it will have a positive impact on social, financial and the economic growth of Australia. I am really excited to see the NBN unfold and will surely be something I will keep my eyes out on. Good Luck NBN company!
Fundamentally, Enterprise 2.0 is about enabling teams to work better within the team and with other teams within the organisation. This led me to think about what is a well balanced team that can get things done effectively?
What does a good team comprise of?
Instead of reinventing the wheel, I hunted for some good resources. Kathleen Eisenhardt, Professor in Management Science and Engineering at Stanford spoke about the perfect team composition and below are some of her thinking.
A well balanced team are the following:
1) 3 to 5 people (if less than 3 then there will be too much work for everyone and its not really a team; if its more, then alot of time will be spent coordinating the work)
2) team members should be cross functional (two engineers do not make a good team)
3) team members should have a history of working together
4) Best teams have a variety of ages which reflects different life experiences thus providing a balanced view.
I think what Eisenhardt said is really good. Traditionally, the successful teams I have been part of displayed most, if not all, of the above traits.
Organising teams within an Enterprise 2.0 platform
This led me to think about organising team spaces within an enterprise 2.0 platform. I guess many early adopters of Enterprise 2.0 are faced with the issue of “How should we organise the spaces on the platform?” This is an important question as unused spaces could be viewed as failure by some new members of the community and if too much information within a space could be too overwhelming. We need a right balance.
I feel that a good way to manage is to replicate the real world team in the online environment. Within an organisation there are departments, service lines, teams and each should have a space of their own. Managers needs to start from the top of the organisation and start breaking them down into teams of 3-5 people and once this is achieve, get people to start contributing within the team and across teams.
This way, it provides individual teams with their own space and also a common space within department or higher level team where cross team communication can take place.
This is the largest flash mob in a single city. 21,000 people coming together dancing in sync – unpaid, connected via twitter, facebook and all the cool technologies. They came together, learn the dance steps and performed!
From Wikipedia: A flash mob is a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time, then quickly disperse. The term flash mob is generally applied only to gatherings organized via telecommunications, social media, or viral emails.
This is an example of the power of crowds. There is no financial or economic model that can explain this phenomena – just like Wikipedia. Watch it and feel it.
Enterprise 2.0 applications are sprouting all over the place and there are many start ups developing innovative products. However, only a few software makes it into the category Enterprise 2.0, many others are more like “point-solutions” Enterprise 2.0.
Enterprise 2.0, as the name states, is supposed to be an enterprise solution. Just like there is one CRM or ERP in one company. When there are more of these sorts of enterprise software, integration, data integrity and updates becomes a problem. So what does an “enterprise” Enterprise 2.0 platform consist of?
So, for starters, lets look at some of the market leaders like Jive, Socialtext, OpenText, Telligent and Mindtouch and get some understanding of what is being offered. The very standard functionalities most of the market leaders provide are wikis, blogs, social bookmarks, discussions, project management (to some degree), multimedia support, dashboards, communities, user profiles and messaging.
These functionalities are all good and highly critical within an enterprise 2.0 platform.
Let’s now step back and understand the concept of Enterprise 2.0 – its about connecting, coordinating and communicating across teams, networks and the whole organisation. Andrew Mcafee suggested that there are strong, weak, potential and no ties within an organisation (Please watch the video to get a full understanding of what I am talking about).
A strong tie is the relationships between two people that must meet the following criteria: 1) interaction, 2) affection and 3) history of interaction. Weak ties are acquaintances within a social network and argued that that the only thing what can connect two social networks with strong ties is a weak tie. Potential ties mean that there are connections between the two parties however they require a few weak tie connections. No ties means that the ties are either too far away to be any effective in leveraging that relationship or there are just no existing ties between the two parties. Andrew suggested that software like wikis are great for strong tied teams and social networking is great for weak tied relationships. Blogs are fantastic for potential ties and prediction markets are great for no tied relationships. Now, we have a framework to work with to analyse what does an “enterprise” Enterprise 2.0 platform consist of.
Strong ties – team based collaboration and communication
So what are the tools we need to leverage team operations better? What do teams do? As many would have experienced, teams work together towards a specific goals and commonly, documents and spreadsheets are everywhere. I feel that teams need, on top of the current functionalities listed above, a common discussion forum, issue tracking tool, project management tool, mandatory instant messenger, video conference capability and advance notification.
Weak ties – Social networking and connecting with others
What would people like to do while trying to reach out to their community, share a few ideas, get to know someone better and network? I think in this space, entertainment is important. Providing employees with a platform to communicate, have some levels of fun and share photos / videos of their holiday is a great way to get people together socially. Team based photos could also be put online. What is even better if there is a connection between the internal system and facebook where the user could select only some photos of themselves and show it internally and leave the embarrassing drunk weekend photos for their friends.
Potential ties – broadcast ideas and reach out to everyone
What is the best way to leverage everyone within the organisations as and when you need it? Aardvark and Hypios are two excellent and innovative tools I feel that could add great value to the organisation in this space. Aardvark is a platform that hunts for the best available person to answer a question posted by a user. Hypios on the other hand is an open innovation platform where users can post questions and get experts to respond to it.
No ties
In this space, as Andrew discussed, prediction markets are useful in leveraging these resources. However, what I see is that we still have a long way to go.
The trend in Enterprise 2.0 implementation seems to start at strong ties and it slowly moves down the line. This makes sense. Wikis and collaboration in strong tie teams are the easiest to justify the ROI on it. However, it will be much harder to calculate the ROI on prediction markets (at least currently its true). I think what software vendors needs to do is to focus on strong ties and slowly move down the line as well. I think the above is what is needed in an “enterprise” Enterprise 2.0 platform. Please feel free to add or comment on it.
I was just doing my banking and was thinking that banks have legislation to protect my money against fraud and theft. If there was a system error and my money was stolen, they have to put it back somehow. Why can’t this be done for data centres and cloud computing providers? The data in an organisation’s database/software could potentially be alot more valuable than the cash in their bank. If the data was missing, companies could be out of business. If the data was stolen, competitiveness, organisational secrets and privacy could be compromised. These are highly valuable but probably harder to quantify it in dollar terms.
If this is the case, why can’t the government enforce some sort of legislation on data centre providers and cloud computing suppliers? Maybe an insurance amount could be paid to ensure data integrity and security? If organisations do not pay that they do not get the benefit of the security? These are just some high level thoughts.
Cloud computing is not only great for businesses technically, its also very low cost and fantastic for the environment. These are areas that are of interests to government. If more businesses could reduce their cost and make more money, they could potentially be stimulating the economy. Green IT has also been a popular topic in the IT and since government’s are trying to reduce green house emissions, why not start with one of the largest energy consuming technology – computers?
This is an idea that came up from no where and something that could be looked at. What are your thoughts on this? Is this feasible? Does government have any incentives to tackle this? Would businesses be willing to pay more? If yes, how much? What will be the liability of data centre providers? Feel free to comment.
I have been a user of HSDPA/3.5g services for a while now and its interesting to see how my life have changed during this time. Previously, I was chained to a desk in order to access the internet to do anything however, nowadays, I could be on the taxi to the airport, I can reply emails, check the progress of my team on the collaboration platform and talk to colleagues on IMs. After I land at the other airport, I can check my mail on my mobile and catch a quick quiet moment to think about stuff. This is revolutionary without 3g services, half my traveling time will be wasted doing next to nothing.
However, what I found was that speeds are maybe rather decent nowadays but there is still alot of room to grow in this space. Theoretical speeds are well marketed but the real speeds that users could achieve are still lower as compared to broadband speeds.
What I foresee in the future is that mobile internet speeds will increase and will be more stable for everyday, all day usage. This is quite expected by most people and its just a matter of time we get there. However, what challenges will this pose and what doors will it open?
One of the technical challenges this will pose is to deliver high quality, low cost corporate applications on to mobile phones with the right level of security wrapping the service. There isn’t a real standard for delivering such services at the moment and it will be a while before we can see this happening. Secondly, content of all sorts can be delivered via the web to the mobile but processing power on mobiles needs to be able to cope with the increase in content and speeds. Thirdly, typing on mobile phones is something that is not very easy and for it to become mainstream work platform, more advance user interface needs to be developed to improve the capability of employees using this on the road.
This will open a lot of doors to the business world. Areas like location based advertising, integrated public transport / movie ticket purchasing system, integrated credit card system, corporate applications on the go, low cost/free international calls via VOIP on mobiles and so much more. This is an interesting and fast changing development in the internet/telecommunication market that will be somewhat life changing. Can’t wait to see it unfold.
I have been discussing incentives in for a Web 2.0 environment quite abit recently. Incentives comes in many forms, shapes and sizes. I would like to discuss more about the incentives that could be used in such an environment to improve adoption and usage. I will provide some high level case studies as well.
1) Solving a personal problem
Many social networking tools like Facebook and Aardvark help solve a personal problem. Users could connect with their friends online, check out their photos and status and communicate on Facebook. The functionality provided by Facebook was something that could not be done previously via emails. In Aardvark’s case, if you have a question that could not be answered, a user can ask aardvark and they will search for someone who they think could know the answer and help the user. This solves a real issue. There are certain things that could be quite difficult to find on the web or getting real recommendations for people living in a specific country. Solving a personal problem for a user delivers the highest incentive for the user. If a tool could make their life easier and better, users would move quickly onto the platform to leverage the benefit.
2) Financial incentive
We will look at Innocentive, Innocentive is a collaboration site which allows companies to post questions regarding a specific problem like, formulating a new shampoo formula. These are relatively difficult questions to answer and requires deep specific knowledge in the problem. R & D departments cannot answer all the questions an organisation have and if they could “outsource” it to the pool of talent out there in the world, it was shown that this could help reduce the cost and R&D. Innocentive provides users with a monetary reward for the question that has been picked by the company. The reward could vary and its been known that researchers on Innocentive could get thousands of dollars or a small cut of the revenue. With a good amount of money in discussion here, people could possibly be interested in making a few thousand more.
3) Recognition and satisfaction
Just like contributing to a Wiki or a open source software project, there is seldom a monetary reward nor it could help solve a personal problem directly. However, there are people in the world who are highly passionate about something that they are willing to give up their time and contribute to a cause that is close to their hearts. In return if they do a good job, they will get public recognition (in many varous ways) from their contribution, be seen as a leader in that space and also be satisfied with their achievements. This form of incentive is somewhat unstable as there is a number of dependencies that is required for it to happen effectively. And I would like to note that there are alot of small open source projects out there that is driven by less than four contributors and I suspect that many of them are real life friends as well (just my observation).
Web 2.0 was never about some mindless people who has alot of time on their hands who just decides to do something. Humans have never worked this way and possibly never will. We live in a competitive environment and require some sort of return on investment and time. The above is just some of the high level incentives that should be considered while designing a new platform.
One of the ideas I have been thinking of lately is how organisations could semi-outsource their support structures using the web 2.0 way. There are many instances of big brands like Lego, Harley Davidson, Nokias, iPhones and so on that has a large base of fanatic fans and lovers. They talk about what they are interested in with their friends and spend alot of time understanding and exploring the products. These experts have a wealth of knowledge, possibly more than some of the people the companies hire who comes in to look for a job instead of being passionate about a product.
Previously, some of these companies tried to leverage these experts by getting them to provide feedback and innovative ideas into upcoming products. I think that is fantastic and possibly the best way to do user acceptance testing. However, I would like to extend this idea.
Other than experts, there will also be beginner and amateur users and more than likely, the lower they are the more support they need. Even though, the revenue per customer could be much lower down the ladder but due to size, it could possibly be a large amount of revenue (depending on the types of goods sold). Organisations must be able to support these customers in a low cost manner – its only logical low revenue/customer = low cost to support/customer. So what is an efficient way of supporting these people?
We surely know of the standard call centre and web support type models and they are here to stay for a long time. However, we could extend the web platform and get the more advance users to help the less savvy user. But what is my incentive for helping as an advance user? Why should I take time out to help others out of my busy schedule? Well, I can’t answer any of these, but incentives must be given. Whether its public recognition, money, new products for free/lower cost or attending a community function, I can’t say which is the best. This will depend on the types of goods sold and many many other factors.
If this could be done right, there are a few things that could be achieved. 1) Improved bonding between customers (could potentially be a double -edge sword though) 2) Brand loyalty, 3) lower cost support, 4) “keeping the money in the family” 5) generating ideas and innovation not only from experts but from everyone.
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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