Synergise IT

I always believe that for people to use Enterprise 2.0, organisations must give people the purpose and reason to use it. In a knowledge economy, many employees are required to think and make decisions at various levels. However, many employees nowadays still use systems like SAP, Siebel and “friends”. So how can organisations make Enterprise 2.0 relevant to employees when they spend most of their work time handling other types of systems? Simple, integrate - however, its easier said than done!!! I shall give you a Telco example.

Telco software
Most might not know, other than my deep interest in Enterprise 2.0, I have interests and experience in implementing telecommunication systems. I have worked with various software in the market and understand them pretty well. While all these software has APIs, web services and stuff like that, they are pretty much targeted for integration with other telco system providing different kinds of functionality. Telco software should improve and integrate better with Enterprise 2.0 technologies.

Enterprise 2.0 and Telcos
Within the lifecycle of a customer, Enterprise 2.0 / Web 2.0 can provide many benefits for the customers and employees should be part of it. So when a customer buys a new phone/internet service via the call centre or online, workflows are triggered to carry out various tasks depending on the business rules. However, shit always happens. Somehow, something will break due to many reasons and troubleshooting begins. Enterprise 2.0 can facilitate the troubleshooting process through its collaborative capabilities and save time as other people can contribute to the troubleshooting process and streamlined communication improves turnaround time. Also, in many cases, the call centre and the troubleshooting dudes are located in two different places and this helps to save money on phone calls.

Web 2.0 and Telcos
Also if there is a fault in the system, Web 2.0 can inform the customer quickly so that you save the call centre costs of affected calling in to whine about it. Web 2.0 can also help to reduce problem calls to the call centre through online forums, discussions and commenting. The idea is to let your customers help your customers.

Telcos are big companies and expensive to run and everyone is different. I am not saying that all telcos needs to do the above. I am saying that Telcos needs to understand Enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0 and study how such technologies can help them save money, increase efficiency and reduce errors and if such investments are worth it or not.

I am in a love-hate situation now. I love my RSS reader because it delivers news, blogs and rss updates from work. Its great! But every hour, I get hundreds of notifications. I read selectively. However, its just too much.

Alrite, if I sign up to a RSS feeds from say, NY Times World news, I am bound to get quite alot of updates because somehow people are constantly interested in people killing each other. However, for my work related RSS feeds, I get a whole lot of unrelated feeds too. However, within the work related feeds, there are a few feed updates that I need to action on. At the moment, I am pretty flat out at work and I still have to go through the feeds to get my action items - that was a pain in the butt.

I then thought wouldn’t it be good to have intelligent feeds? The RSS feeds can organise and tell you which feeds are more important than the rest from analysing the content/tags, where it came from, time line associated with it (work related and if available), who wrote it and rank all of them.

With Enterprise 2.0, more and more people are working across boundaries, teams and projects and currently there is no good way to sort out the feeds / information / emails that comes from all these various places. I am truely suffering from information overload.

Wall Street Journal Blogs published a study conducted by Ed Moran on “Why Most Online Communities Fail”. I found this study extremely amusing. Please read the article before reading on.

… according to Ed Moran, a Deloitte consultant who just completed a study of more than 100 businesses with online communities. Not surprisingly, these sites failed to gain traction with customers. Thirty-five percent of the online communities studied have less than 100 members; less than 25% have more than 1,000 members – despite the fact that close to 60% of these businesses have spent over $1 million on their community projects. “A disturbingly high number of these sites fail,” Moran tells us.

According to his study, there are so many errors that companies made during their implementation. First of all, online community platform is supposed to be a growing and evolving platform. Its a content platform and no matter how well you migrate your data from other platforms, people need to get used to using your online platform. Spending a million bucks on community projects gives me the impression companies did it with the Big Bang approach. To me, thats a no-no.

Personally, I feel that companies do need a community manager (read: sysadmin). However, many people I speak to thinks that the community manager is the gardener for the whole wiki or collaborative platform. I totally disagree. The community manager is to strategise and manage the community but not editing text, moving pages and organising stuff.

To get a successful online community running, the best way is to give it to a professional consulting company like BearingPoint who has the experience and knowledge of creating such types of systems SUCCESSFULLY. Even though, organisations might get bottom up adoption of such technologies, consulting firms should be hired to provide a long term strategy, vision and change management to provide organisations with a clear road map of their investment.

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule) states that, for many events, 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. My academic friend asked me this earlier this week, if Pareto rule holds, therefore an Enterprise 2.0 investment (might cost hundreds of thousands to implement) might not be a good idea at all. If 80% of the content on an Enterprise 2.0 platform is contribute by only 20% of the employees then it defeats the purpose of enterprise wide collaboration and the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 would not be achieved. Theoretically he is right.

However, from my experience of implementing Enteprise 2.0, if the organisation creates a purpose for people to use the Enterprise 2.0 platform for their daily work and team collaboration across geographic boundaries then the uptake would be extremely different. Lets face it, most people do not like to work and they are at work to make money. So for people to adopt something new and move out of their comfort zone to use Enterprise 2.0 technologies, it must first be directly beneficial to their work and make their life easier on an individual basis.

Whenever I speak to newbies about Enterprise 2.0, alot of questions arises. Some are genuine concerns and some are Norman-ish questions. However, when a real life example is provided and I illustrate how Enterprise 2.0 can help them and make their life easier, they become converts straight away. Within hours, they get onto the platform and never looked back and so far I can see that contribution volume is based on the amount of work they were assigned to complete and not the 80-20 rule.

From the above, I can safely say that The Pareto Principle doesn’t apply. I will continue to look more into this and monitor the long term results. There might be chance that Pareto principle might hold in the long run.

Andrew McAfee wrote about the most important factors for Enterprise 2.0 and one of the points is “Tools are egalitarian and freeform”. I totally agree with him and in the ideal world, it would be the best that everyone on the platform is equal, respected and treated the same way. Sounds great doesn’t it - communism in theory is a great idea too but it will never ever work in real life.

How can we ensure or promote such kinds of behaviour within the organisation? Also, can the tool have any features to prevent “bullying” from happening?

Previously, I conducted an experiment and it didn’t work out very well. I have since started another experiment at the request of a close friend.

Let me tell you abit more about this. I wanted to increase collaboration among two different teams across two geographical locations. It is not possible for these teams to have regular face to face meetings and they are both working on the same thing.

So I encouraged everyone on the team to get onto a Wiki, pre-populated the Wiki with some important information and structure. When the team first logon, they commented they wanted this and that and I accomodated the requests accordingly. As 90% of the team has never contributed to the Wiki before, I spent 10 mins explaining to concept of the Wiki and “best practices” to them. I did not enforce any rules on the wiki and let them do whatever they wanted.

The outcome was the total opposite of what happened previously. Everyone started playing with it first and one senior staff said “its easier than I thought”. Within a day, everyone on the team was contributing their part of the puzzle to the Wiki. What I found was that different people used it differently. Some was commenting alot, some were uploading their completed Word files to the wiki and using it as a document repository, some were afraid of commenting on the wiki and sent comments via email. I must say these are not best practices for sure. However, I am not too bothered - at these they are using it.

I was invited to re-educated them again. I reiterated the same story I told them on the first meeting and more questions arose (mainly conceptual and technical questions). Most of them were much more attentive and the meeting was more interactive as well. They were hooked for sure. Its been a while now and EVERYONE loves it. I get emails of satisfaction for implementing this for them.

Just for everyone’s curiosity, 1/2 the team were baby boomers! This time round, I got the technology right as well!

I have been looking at IBM Lotus connections recently and I must say that its a pretty impressive product. As compared to Jive’s Clearspace, its generally the same but I am sure Sam would would be able to tell us more about the in depth difference. I think the final decision between the top few products in the market (IBM Lotus connections, Jive’s Clearspace, ThoughtFarmer or SocialText) would really boil down to cost, maintenance and support.

One thing I really do not understand about IBM connections is that it doesn’t have private or public messaging capabilities.

1) It doesn’t have the Facebook’s status (i.e. Sean is writing a blog at the moment and wondering why Connections doesn’t have this functionality). This might not be that important but the next one is.

2) It doesn’t have facebook’s “the wall”. I can’t write a message to one person or a selected group of people! Come’on if this is a social platform, its about communication and sending a message would probably be one of the most common way of communication. I would expect a few messaging capabilities a) public message to one person b) public message to a group of people c) private messaging. I would also expect a event calendar / invite functionality but this is really secondary and would be a “nice to have”

If anyone from IBM is reading this and disagree with me, feel free to educate me. I might be wrong here and glad to learn from anyone. Also if you are from Jive, ThoughtFarmer or SocialText, please feel free to let me know your differentiating factors/features.

Competitive advantage was coined by Michael Porter where he proposed that businesses are exposed to five competitive forces – threat of new entrants, rivalry between existing firms, pressures from substitute products, bargaining power of buyers and bargaining power of suppliers. Porter also devised three strategies that can combat the forces from the environment and they are – differentiation of products and services, cost reduction and focus on a particular market segment.

While there are many ways in which organisations can pursue to achieve competitive advantage, it would be futile if other organisations can replicate the same method used quickly. However, with technological advancement, competitive advantage can be replicated quickly and the first mover advantage gap is being decreased greatly. Therefore in order for an organisation to enjoy sustainable competitive advantage, it needs to continually be the first mover over a period of time. Let’s take Google as a case study.

Google has been a very innovative company with their main line of business developing search technology. Over the past few years, Google has expanded their business to many parts of the internet which ranges from desktop search engine, email services, satellite imaging, online translation, blogs, online shopping, e-books, scholarly search and many more. While many of these applications doesn’t bring in much revenue, the collection of innovative and useful products and services has attracted many more people to use it search services thus providing excellent advertising revenue.

So how can Enterprise 2.0 provide sustainable competitive advantage for organisations? If an organisation is highly adaptive to the environment and is capable of exploiting opportunities on a continuous basis then it would be able to achieve some level of sustainable competitive advantage . This can be achieved through continuous learning, experimenting and effective communication and Enterprise 2.0 provides a platform to do this. However, it doesn’t mean an organisation has the platform they would achieve sustainable competitive advantage. There must be a conducive culture, social strategy and eager employees within an organisation to effectively identify any opportunities.

Enterprise 2.0 can help to capture, store and manage the implicit and explicit knowledge within an organisation and this is highly important for larger organisations. Enterprise 2.0 can help to retain the vast amount of knowledge within the organisation. The advantage of Enterprise 2.0 over Knowledge management systems is its ability to connect people from around the organisation and effectively use employees brain power.

I would like to conclude by saying that Enterprise 2.0 does not provide an organisation sustainable competitive advantage but is an excellent enabler for organisations to identify any potential opportunities to gain competitive advantage - constantly.

Co-creation, peer production or open innovation, whatever you call it, its pretty much the same thing - Getting your customers and community to provide feedback and spend time exploring and innovating new/existing products/services for your benefit.

McKinsey & Company released a new paper on The next step in open innovation and it talks about co-creation, how organisations can win from it, what are the hurdles and discussed about many case studies like Lego, Boeing, Threadless and Peugeot.

There are three ways to win with co-creation according to McKinsey
1) Capturing value from the co-create product - Well, Lego reap much benefits by talking to and understanding their die-hard fans. Watch this video.

2) Capture value by providing complementary product or service - Red Hat sells technology services to uses of Linux. IBM also invested a substantial amount of money and time in the open source community (Linux) and installs its software on their servers and sell it as a package.

3) Benefit indirectly from the co-creation process, for example, through an enhanced brand or strategic position. McKinsey did not give any example on this but I believe this is more from the marketing perspective where people start playing around with your product and learn more about it, the brand image becomes better(??) Do I make sense here?

There are hurdles as well according to McKinsey.
1) Attracting and motivating co-creators. This is simple - you need to squeeze time out of the right people to contribute to your organisation for free or for a small price/incentive.

2) Structuring the problems for participation. I totally believe that for co-creation to happen, a big problem must be broken down into bite size portions and people can take one portion each and explore/innovate on it.

3) Governance mechanisms to facilitate co-creation - well we have rules and guidelines in almost all aspects of life. Co-creation shall be the same.

4) Maintaining quality - There are two ways to look at quality within an open environment. a) the team is only as strong as its weakest link or b) look at the quality of Linux and Wikipedia when the critical mass is achieved. I believe for the success of an open innovation program, critical mass is absolutely important. Look at Marketocracy its almost a open source mutual fund and its Marketocracy Masters 100 Fund Received 5-Star rating from Morningstar in May 2008. That’s achievable by the 55,000 strong community they have.

I had the luxury and pain of working in two extremely diverse projects previously.

The first one - a highly supportive, trusting and friendly environment. Enterprise 2.0 tools was implemented - wiki, collaborative project management and IMs. Everyone worked really well together and there was NO conversation like “I will send you an email to confirm what we have just spoken (so that I can document this conversation)”. People trusted each other and the Enterprise 2.0 tools flourished. People contributed, shared knowledge and discussed for the better of the program. When the client saw what we were doing, they asked to join in the “fun” and the relationship between the client and us became better as well.

The second one - a extremely cunning, slimy, scheming, competitive and politically challenging environment. Armed with a extremely good Enterprise 2.0 experience, I thought Enterprise 2.0 might reduce/soften the politically climate. I was extremely extremely wrong. I proposed E2 tools a few times and it got rejected. It never went live. I then checked out a FAQ that someone else had in another part of project. There was some information on it that I needed and a few months later, I went back and the page was missing. After some investigation, I found the guy who deleted it and asked him why. He said, “my boss didn’t want me to share such valuable information.”

Although through the above examples, I cannot generalise on the requirement for trust and friendliness as a prerequisite for the success of Enterprise 2.0 but I do believe to a certain degree this will be true. If the organisation is politically very heated, it is unlikely people would share and contribute. After all, humans are more likely to share with someone else if they trust and like the person - this is human nature.