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)
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.
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.
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.
Many business leaders acknowledged that Enterprise 2.0 is something important to the organisation and some of these leaders have spent time investigating how they can implement it and leverage the benefits of Enterprise 2.0. A smaller group of them have adopted Enterprise 2.0 within their organisations. This is all great news.
I believe that many leaders do not understand that Enterprise 2.0 changes the way people work within an organisation – from the top all the way to the bottom. Gen Y’s are looking for open communication, honesty, information and innovation. The younger generation is expecting alot from their leaders and this is will have a growing impact on organisations as more Gen Y’s enter into the workforce. Leaders must start changing the way they manage their organisations, the old command and control way of doing things is slowly fading away. Collaboration, communication and innovation are all important aspects.
I am not saying that all command and control should be removed. What I am saying is that leaders need to find the right balance in everything they do. Constantly seeking feedback on issues that affect individuals, collaborate and listen to employees, embrace and fine-tune innovations.
Having being part of an Enterprise 2.0 implementation, I soon found out that collaboration and communication is awesome. My efficiency is way through the roof and I can accomplish more within a day. However, what I also found is that when I am faster and more efficient, I was taking in alot more information and processing more tasks within the same day. Technology could help deliver the right information to me when required but I can only do that much within a day. I can only process a certain amount of information a day and complete that many tasks (tasks that requires brain and decision making functions).
Where is the future for Enterprise 2.0? Once organisations embrace this technologies, are we at the peak of human collaboration, communication and sharing?
Some might contest that artificial intelligence and agents could help to deliver even higher capabilities, but AI has been a concept for over 20 odd years and nothing really concrete has emerged. Even Business Intelligence nowadays is dependent on the reports and analytics we design and implement into the production system. AI has still some distance to cover before it can be commercially viable.
What I am trying to say here is that as employees are becoming more efficient with the help of technology like Enterprise 2.0, BI and things like that we are bounded to the fact that we can only do that much a day. Are we reaching a point where humans are at the most efficient and there is not much more room to grow?
With the recent economy crisis, many universities are facing a huge drop in thier funding from corporate organisations and layoffs is somewhat common. In the most recent event, even Harvard is facing a tough time. Having spent alot of time in universities, I have found that many of the ideas I discuss with my professors years ago are becoming an industry trend now and first movers have become rich and famous. There’s money to be made.
When I was in University, and no offence to my Alma Mater, I did some really silly projects that had absolutely no value (financial or educational). Considering that most universities groom the future talents in their space and having many thousands of them on campus, I am pretty sure we can do something to optimise the usage of the brain power that is lying around. Not just from the professors or PhD holders but also from the young and energetic students. There is wisdom and knowledge in universities and there is also a huge crowd!
By leveraging this knowledge and the power of crowds, Universities could set up successful startups and once it starts making money, the money could then be fed back into the university as extra funding and benefit both the students and employees. As far as I know, Univeristies have been doing this and even some employees have came out on their own and implemented their own great ideas. Since this is the case why not make it bigger and better?
Traditionally, organisations hide information from the public to maintian their competitive advantage, secure trade secrets and a whole lot of various reasons. This is logical and I understand. However, within organisations, people also try to hide to improve their position, power and importance. The enterprise 2.0 idea reflects a total opposite of this. People are asked to collaborate, exchange information and share. I call it the “love all, serve all” model.
Let’s face it, within organisations there are always a bunch of people that are like that – love to hide stuff. They do not see the benefit in sharing. Is it true that hiding can propel someone’s career? Can the enterprise 2.0 way propel it even further? These are questions that I can’t answer for sure but I do believe the Enterprise 2.0 can propel someone’s career in a great way.
In any case, how can we change a politically intense environment and get users to share and contribute? First of all, senior management needs to acknowledge that its a problem and it needs to change. There will also be some changes that needs to be made to the company culture, team bonding and common understanding. They can start by doing it themselves and setting an example. One must know that in a politically intense environment, sucking up to senior management is generally one of the traits.
Next, middle management needs to provide a reason for everyone lower in the food chain to come onbaord and use it. I always believe this – if there is no reason for me to do something, why do it?
I think alot of people underestimate the importance of a quality enterprise 2.0 tool. Personally, my team and myself use it daily and posts hepas of information and comment of truck loads of stuff. If its something of such importance, make sure its a good tool and fantastic and pretty tools are pretty cheap too! We cannot just look at the functional requirements but also the look and feel of it. There are plenty of people in the world who are not techies and look at things very differently.
What’s your experience in implementing Enterprise 2.0 in a political sensitive environment? Would be interested to hear your side of the story.
We have heard of various resistance stories when it comes to Enterprise 2.0 / collaboration initiatives. There are also many blog posts regarding this topic. Today, I would like to approach this topic from an academic perspective.
There are three key reasons why people resist changes in technology.
1) Internal factors to the person or group – where it targets reactions like “People resist all change; People with analytic cognitive styles accept systems; while intuitive thinkers resist them”
2) Application or technical factors – if its a crappy system, people will resist it.
3) Interaction factors – where the new application or system would change the balance of power in organisations and people who are threaten by it would resist it.
In the Enterprise 2.0 world, I believe that all three factors can cause resistance but I feel that the third factor is probably the most problematic factor. How can we go about managing this?
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.
2 Comments to Read 
