In my career, I am lucky enough to meet technologist from all kinds of background, from the geekiest computer scientist to business/IT advisers. Recently, I spoke to a technical architect who commented this – Social software is child’s play, just install it and let employees run wild.
I was pretty shocked when I heard this. I was just thinking, the entire Cisco is banging their bucks on Web 2.0, organisations now are scrambling to understand how this technology can help improve their performance and Forrester / Gartner has dedicated teams trying to understand this fast changing phenomena. All these effort just for installing a software and let employees run wild?
Alot of Enterprise Web 2.0 is not just in the technology itself. I look at the Enterprise 2.0 platform as a car. A car’s objective is to bring people from point A to point B (even though some people buy cars to show off – but that’s not the point). Enterprise 2.0 platform is also the same. It helps brings the organisation to where they want to be – leverage collective intelligence, streamlined communication, real time updates on changes, better knowledge sharing, enhanced collaboration and so on. The benefits are immense! I am not saying that the platform is not important. Just like a car, some people would choose to buy a Toyota / Honda, some will choose to buy a BMW / Audi and some would choose to buy a Porsche / Ferrari. Different car deliver different performance, comfort and features. Different social platform do the same thing too! Its all about how much an organisation is willing to pay, the features they require and the tools that they need.
More importantly, before one purchase a car, one would need to plan their needs, what they want and how much they can afford. There’s a fair amount of planning, requirements gathering and cost calculation involved in the process. Enterprise 2.0 is the same. There are heaps of planning, strategy work, change management and solution design involved. If this is not done properly, the software might not be fit for purpose.
After the purchase of the car, one would need to maintain the car sending it for regular maintenance. Enterprise 2.0 is the same too. Not just the IT support and infrastructure maintenance but also managing virtual teams, information governance and “gardening” the platform. There is a lifecycle around an Enterprise 2.0 implementation. Its NOT just installing a software – its not that simple.
I must say that having used all 5 products before and each of them is really fantastic. Each has its own pros and cons and depending on your requirements different software should be chosen. I am glad to see that there is a good competition in this space and that makes my life as a consultant a tad easier having the ability to pick and choose the best product for the situation.
What is really interesting is that there is no one in the category of “Leaders”. Atlassian, Jive and Socialtext barely made it into the “visionaries” quadrant (they are all sitting on the line of the quadrant). All three products are really quite revolutionary. I demo-ed Jive to a class previously and a student responded saying, “its just a web page but its so smart” and a colleague said that the Atlassian Wiki we have within BearingPoint made his life so much better.
Next, IBM / Microsoft are in the “Challengers” quadrant with a much higher ability to execute but lack in vision. I personally think that IBM and Microsoft are not “visionary” because the general business environment is not quite ready for such software as of now. Many business people still do not quite understand what is Web 2.0, collaboration, social media and buzz words like that. I believe they are taking a wait and see strategy to this area of software development.
I would love to see next year’s results and hope to see some of the players rise up to the visionary quadrant!
I have been doing some high level research on Microsoft Dynamics and I personally think its a great product for SMBs. It has the full suite of software like CRM, financial management, SCM, BI and project management – Microsoft Dynamics also provide some levels of collaboration for team members.
After reading on Microsoft Dynamics, it seems like their customer base is generally the mid size companies and not the super large global enterprises. I suspect being a relatively new player in the business applications market, they are still trying to fight with Oracle and SAP on a piece of the pie.
Please watch the two case study videos below to find out abit more.
If anyone has any comments and/or experience using this software, please drop me a comment. If you are from Mircosoft, I am also interested to hear your sales pitch.
I was asked an extremely good question yesterday on the barriers of entry for large organisations for Enterprise 2.0 technologies.
1) Large companies (assuming global organisations too) generally have alot of different cultures to deal with due to globalized operations. Enterprise 2.0 is more about the people than the technology, dealing with many different cultures can be a challenge.
2) Software are not really mature yet. There is still no software out there that can seamlessly integrate structured and un-structured data. All companies have both types of data and its not good enough if there is no integration between them.
3) Customisation of Enterprise 2.0 software is low (possibly expensive as well). We all know that technology should be integrated into the business environment and culture and not the other way around. Currently, there is no cost effective way to customise Enterprise 2.0 software (which doesn’t have a clear ROI or TCO). With that, the willingness to pay would be lower as compared to a SAP system.
4) Change management practices for enterprise 2.0 is still not well understood. Even though change management in general is a well established field in the IT industry, Enteprise 2.0 change management requires something even bigger as it changes the underlying work culture and to some extent the business process. Such forms of changes is tricky and must be well understood before engaging in it.
5) Benefits of Enterprise 2.0 is still very unclear on a large scale basis. ROI is unclear too. This makes is hard for the CFO who is traditionally money minded, to approve an investment with no clear returns.
Have you heard of this term before?? Nomadic Information Systems is defined when users have access to his / her personal information space from all places independent from specific devices. Some people call it mobile convergence too – similar ideas.
Interesting enough, everything is moving towards a unified view of all data / information. Previously, different devices does different stuff, different software does different stuff, different country uses different standards and the list goes on and on. However, with the birth of smart phones and with the recent and very prominent entrance of the iPhone, one could get everything in one device. GPS, emails, surf the web (which is the whole world in your hands), calendar and entertainment – all achievable as long as you have network connection and battery power.
So what has this gotta do with Enterprise 2.0 and the organisation? I can be quite sure that most companies have different systems doing different things and getting a consolidated view of all the stuff that is going on can be a nightmare, getting a streamlined business process is a nightmare and support for a large number of disparate systems is way to expensive. That’s why IT transformation projects gets approved by the board of directors and some companies spend billions of dollars on it.
Enterprise 2.0 aims to do something similar as well – for a piece of the puzzle. Enterprise 2.0 aims to organise unstructured data. Document manager, wiki, blogs, bookmarks, people, resume, project tasks, timelines and so on. As you can see previously many of the above functions have a specific system that handles it. Now, Enterprise 2.0 can do everything in one place for you (unstructured data convergence). What enterprise 2.0 vendors needs to do is to quickly move on and integrate unstructured data convergence into their toolset. Whether it may be a SAP / salesforce / oracle connector or a business mashup, unstructured data and structured data must work hand in hand.
Well, if you are a vendor and thinking – that’s impossible or its too hard to do, hang on. I know its hard to do and would take a long time. I am just putting up a wish list at the moment. =)
My brother asked me this a couple of months back and I have been wanting to get him an excellent answer. Not just the definition but also the impacts for organisations. Here you go!
Collaboration is not only for technologists or any special group of enterprise 2.0 enthusiasts. Enterprise 2.0 is for everyone. It involves the technophobic CEO/CFO, the production line employee, the middle managers, back office operations and many others. It includes the Gen Y, Gen X and baby boomers. It includes people from all walks of life and background. In such a case, usability is utmost important. So far, many collaboration / enterprise social software has done well – IBM Connections, Clearspace, ThoughtFarmer has all done well.
However, is usability enough? Well, its very important for sure but there is more. Such platforms manages unstructured data very well but in every business and job scope, structure and unstructured data is being used on a daily basis. I can hear many vendors saying “No worries, we have mashup capabilities”. However, there isn’t a real standard for mashups at the moment. Dapper is a mashup, PageFlakes is also a mashup, Kapow as well. But all of them are different and does different stuff.
What organisations need is a platform that can provide them with excellent capabilities to connect to whatever backend systems, may it be written in Fortran, Cobol, C++ or Java or stored in Sybase, Orcale, mysql or DB2 or connected through WebServices, Java APIs or stored procedures. Whatever it maybe, the mashup platform must provide these capabilities with the collaboration platform. Its must also be easy to create a mashup that anyone with an average understanding of IT would be able to do it.
Why is this important? If an organisation creates such a platform where everyone comes to the same place to work on the same topic and integrating all the structured and unstructured into one place then there is a good chance that organisations can achieve the ultimate benefits of Enterprise 2.0 – knowledge retention, collaboration, streamline communication and innovation.
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.
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.
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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