The “enterprise” Enterprise 2.0 platform
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.
Susan Scrupski said,
I’m just going to get started with prediction markets, but it would seem to me that these markets (which are believed to be highly reliable) would make for a much easier ROI justification for enterprise management. Customers are still grappling with how to quantify the returns on social computing. Where it gets interesting is the scientific analysis of social networks as a rich source of performance data relative to organizational behavior. The market is maturing in any event. We’ll start to see some quantifiable returns as customers cycle through their rollouts. May take years though.
Priyanka D said,
DeskAway is a project management and collaboration tool. We have a blog and microblogging feature which allows the team to interact socially too while managing tasks.
We feel this kind of interaction would be crucial in any team.
Sean Lew said,
@Susan, I absolutely agree with you that IF the results are successful, the ROI is easy to calculate. I think prediction markets is still in its early stages and there is still some distance before I will put my hand up and confidently say that it works. However, research from Google looks extremely promising and I am excited. I share your excitement but I am probably abit more risk averse
@Priyanka, Thanks. I will take a look at DeskAway.
Debbie Goldgaber said,
Dear Sean,
thanks very much for your excellent blog, in general, and your mention of hypios in this post, in particular. I just came across it. I would say that one of the challenges that organization face in trying to use “open-innovation” tools like hypios, is integrating the tool within the workflows and processes of their R&D teams. Without this integration, ideas coming in from the outside can find themselves orphaned–rejected for not being “invented here.” We plan to write more about this integration issue in our thinking section soon (https://www.hypios.com/thinking/). Will be checking in and please do the same with us!
best,
debbie
concepts + communication @hypios
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