G'day, Sean here. I live in Melbourne (Australia) and I am working as a technology consultant for BearingPoint.
This blog is dedicated to topics surrounding Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, Web 2.0 and IT strategies for organizations with the aim of increasing efficiency, increasing profits and reducing costs. Hope you enjoy this blog.
Disclaimer: The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent BearingPoint’s positions, strategies or opinions.
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.
First things first, no one gets smart just by sitting around doing nothing. Learn and explore is the key.
I spoke to a Norman online recently and I thought it was so funny. First of all, this dude is from Asia and being an Asian and personally, I do not think that the culture and mindset in Asia is conducive for open collaboration, sharing and enterprise social networking. Feel free to comment if you think I am wrong or you have any good or bad experiences implementing Enterprise 2.0 in Asia. Let me continue with my conversation.
So he said this “Why would I wanna share my knowledge? I do not want to share my excellent ideas!” First of all, if anyone think that they are the smartest around, think twice. Even Professor Andrew McAfee asks for public contribution on his work. Well, he’s got a PhD and is the guy who coined Enterprise 2.0. I would think he is smart but he stills contribute to the knowledge.
As a Enterprise 2.0 implementer, I constantly think of various roadblocks and speed humps organisations might face and when I think of it, I blog about it most of the time. I will research and make sense of the problem and try to come out with a solution. I must say, I never have the final answer. I write about it and my friends read it, my colleagues read it, my peers read it and people online read it. Regularly, I get people dropping by my desk and say “Great post! I had a similar experience…” or “Mate, I don’t agree because…” I learn from whatever they say, even though I might not agree at that point of time, I will always take it with me and think about it from their point of view. Most of the time, I learn something new, a new perspective, a new idea.
So how does it make me smarter?
1) Thinking of a problem, framing the problem, researching and coming out with an initial solution makes me think and find out something I didn’t know before. I learnt one new thing.
2) From researching, more often than not, you will come across something not related but interesting (hopefully useful, but nevermind if its not). I learnt another new thing.
3) After writing and posting on my blog, I get feedback and comments. I might learn nothing here if not comments but if there are 10, I will learn 10 things.
So from here, you can see that everytime you contribute, you will surely learn something - at least one thing. Continuously, I learn more.
I wrote an email today at work - no surprises here. Its a 100+ word email that really needed 15 words to get the main message across.
The next thing I did once I completed this was to check out my new twits and everything I read was less than 160 characters but told me everything I needed to know. From new blog posts to dinner pictures from complaining about work to constructive discussions about work - everything was recorded in less than 160 characters. What a beauty.
That set me thinking is there a place for Twitter type software within the organisation? I would say yes absolutely. I think there are so many people who write long emails and lose the whole context of the email within those words. (I am guilty too!). However, with only 160 characters, you get the main message across effectively and the reader saves alot of time reading the formalities and explanation. So I thought Twitter has a place in the organisation!
Few hours later, I was sitting with a colleague discussing something and my twitter bell went off and my client was interested to know what it was. I explained to him what twitter was. He (Gen-Y) then thought it was really cool and I asked if he would use it in the office? His reply was - “Aren’t there enough work coming in from emails? Now you want Twitter? You must be crazy”
So do you think there is a place for Twitter within the organisation?
I have been getting many incoming search strings to this blog on SharePoint and KnowledgeTree and I would like to address this question people might have.
Interesting enough, I actually asked KnowledgeTree this question last night but after the meeting, I felt I had asked a rather silly question. Sharepoint and KnowledgeTree are two different products. Traditionally, Sharepoint was a document manager and until now they are still a document manager. However, Sharepoint has added new collaborative and Web 2.0 features into it. However, KnowledgeTree is a document manager with some collaborative features, it doesn’t have the enterprise content management, business forms and business intelligence components that Sharepoint has. If you ask me, Jive’s ClearSpace is probably Sharepoint’s competitor (P.S. Clearspace does a MUCH better job).
KnowledgeTree is Free (pay for support if you want for the community edition. There’s an option to pay for the commercial edition where you get extra features and support - see comments section for more. Thanks Natasha) and Sharepoint, like many Microsoft software, is horrendously expensive. If you are looking for a excellent and cheap document manager, KnowledgeTree is the way to go. If you are thinking about Sharepoint, think again and again. There are many other super excellent options out there. KnowledgeTree has many great features and good extension capabilities. I believe KnowledgeTree has positioned itself as a excellent open source document manager but not a full Enterprise 2.0 suite.
I have one little tip: make sure everyone do their in depth requirements gathering process for any system you are thinking of building / implementing.
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Just to add a point, KnowledgeTree is a fit for purpose Document manager and I totally recommend it to everyone.
I found this series of videos in the depths of youtube. This is a nice change for me from reading the countless articles, blogs, wikis over the past year. Its fantastic and you can flick it to your senior directors and let them watch instead of reading stuff. Enjoy!
Both these concepts are almost the same. Web 2.0 is about using social networking platforms and Enterprise 2.0 is about using social networking platforms within an organisation. However, the environment in which both is operating in is vastly different thus the final outcome can be very different too. Below are some reasons why:
1) Enterprise search is generally not as powerful and integrated as the WWW. If data cannot be found, its as good as not having it. So what if you have a good Wiki and an enterprise “facebook” to help locate people?
2) Work is, after all, just work - to most people. The reason why facebook is successful is because you not only can stay connected with friends, you can do absolutely retarded things on it. You can help feed your mates’ virtual fishes or give them a virtual bourbon. These silly things makes it fun thus users tend to update their profile more often.
For an organisation the user profile will be the key to your corporate “facebook”. If people have a corporate facebook but doesn’t update it, then might as well not have it. They have no incentive to update it anyway coz if they keep it up to date, they get more work!
3) People are busy at work. The fundamental reason why Web 2.0 is successful is because people pool in their FREE time to update their areas of interest like doing silly things on facebook or update Wikipedia on a topic that they are interested in or write a blog like this. However, assuming people are busy at work all day, would they still contribute? Even if they are free for 1 hour, would they rather contribute to a wiki, blog or update something somewhere or would they prefer to go for a coffee, run their personal errands or chat to a colleague? I hope they do but I know that’s NOT reality.
All the above issues I have stated can be rectified and different organisations would use different ways to tackle this and there is no hard and fast solution. I hope I have explained the differences between Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 well here.
Looking from the organisational perspective, would anyone disagree with me if I say the following:
Enterprise 2.0 is internal to an organisation and Web 2.0 is external to an organisation. However, both Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 can be powered by the same technology platform if the organisation chooses to do it. For example, Kapow can be used for internal and / or external mashups.
Google just released Friend Connect a site that allows site owners to add social elements to their site and drive users to your site with these social elements.
Google wrote this on the FriendConnect page
Attract more visitors. Visitors bring along friends from social networks like Facebook, orkut, and others to interact on your site.
Enrich your site with social features. Choose engaging social features from a catalog of gadgets provided by Google and the OpenSocial developer community.
No programming whatsoever. Just copy and paste snippets of code into your site, and Google Friend Connect does the rest.
Google is not only promoting social networking across the world but they are making it easy for people to use this service. Just copy and paste codes into your site and maybe some simple code modification to make this EXACTLY how you want it to be and you have a personalised, mini facebook or myspace setup. Sounds good to me! Check out the video below:
The guys at Infovark wrote a highly interesting post about delivering measurable value through Enterprise 2.0. This is one question I have battled with for ages and ages and I have still yet to come up or read about a good solid value proposition regarding Enterprise 2.0.
As the guys at Infovark stated
Enterprise 2.0 claims to improve efficiency by increasing social productivity. The theory is that by making more information available to more people, and allowing them to connect with each other easily, we can collectively get more done. But does this claim hold true? I’m seeing more and more posts from good folks who can’t deal with the overload of this new social graph. The time spent keeping track of all the communications from all of your contacts might actually make you less productive.
There’s no doubt that a more aware and better connected knowledge worker has the potential to be a more productive one. But the social dimension is only one part of the Enterprise 2.0 equation. In a business context, making connections and managing relationships is a means, not an end.
This is the Big Difference between Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. Enterprise 2.0 needs to deliver measurable value - not just get a bunch of people together to click on advertisements.
I totally agree with the general idea of social networking not being able to deliver measurable value within an enterprise. However, there are some other areas of enterprise 2.0 that could probably deliver measurable value.
1) Mash ups - building of mashups can help deliver faster, timely and more accurate data from a variety of sources. This will reduce the time taken for employees to hunt down these numbers/data from the sources or through some weekly powerpoint/excel status reports. Value can be measured by the reduction of time spent on searching for something. Also if mashup is done externally for your customers, it can deliver measurable value depending on what kind of mashups you build.
2) Enterprise Search - the first letter of “SLATES” or also part of the “FLATNESSES” Model. This is clear, deliver accurate search results from anywhere within the organisation. Reduce time taken to search for stuff on a crappy search engine (which most organisation’s have today). Value can be measured by the reduction of time spent on searching for something.
3) RSS - Information is power. This delivers timely information to employees and would be exceptionally important for people making decisions based on other internal work streams. This reduces the risk of making a wrong decision. Value can be measured by the reduction of errors due to untimely information.
4) Please contribute to this list…
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16 May 2008
4) Added by Aaron (see comments section for the train of thoughts) - “I see this (in E20) as part of building knowledge - lessons learned, best practices, etc. And I believe it is implemented through the W20 tools that of course implies use of tags, mashups, collaboration, linking, “people groups” and so forth. This is my basis for identifying collaboration as working together to create a product, and connectiveness as bringing together the entire body of knowledge.
Measuring value can be difficult, especially if one is looking for tangible returns. Project management can see value thru utilization of lookbacks when starting new projects, when their timelines for preliminary setup and startup times diminish, creating budget benefits. Connectiveness can aid in forming more permanent ties among groups or individuals, can aid in discovery processes to a degree that I don’t believe has been explored well at this point.
Intangible value is relationship building, providing a sense of community within an organization, and to a greater or lesser extent depending on how E20 is implemented, between an organization and its’ support groups (external providers, vendors, etc.)”
I have been exploring many different enterprise 2.0 related open source software and there were two products that came up tops - KnowledgeTree - enterprise grade document manager and Mindtouch - enterprise grade Wiki. Many of the products I have reviewed have highly similar functionality. They do what they are meant to do, store / retrieve documents or collaborate through the Wiki platform - no surprises in this space. However, some of the stuff that I specifically looked at were UI ease of use, scalability, support and APIs. Let’s start with Knowledgetree.
a open source turn-key document management software designed for business people to install, use and purchase. Collaborate with team members, securely store all your documents and ensure regulatory compliance with absolute ease. With no vendor lock-in and with source code readily available, KnowledgeTree provides a more flexible, cost-effective alternative to proprietary applications.
When I first created a demo account for myself on KnowledgeTree, I browsed around the software and it took me nothing more than 2 mins to figure out the site navigation and general functionalities. It was that simple, things were where there as you expect it to be and no surprises, no dramas. UI was totally simple on the eyes and the site in general was pretty. Excellent features includes drag and drop access to the document repository for Windows, integration into MS office applications, customisable “iGoogle type” dashboard, MetaData support, workflows for managing document generation and integration to your applications via SOAP Web Services. See the full list here.
KnowledgeTree API documentation is good and very comprehensive. Scalability is pretty clear from their list of clients and also from clarification with the sales team at KnowledgeTree. Support from the sales team has also been very very quick and answers were clear. I am very impressed. If you are looking for an open source document manager, look no further, Knowledgetree is the one.
MindTouch Deki Wiki is a enterprise Wiki software. The key to Deki Wiki success and popularity is its ease of use and its SUPER excellent widgets and Web Services support. Its pretty much up to your imagination on what you wanna mashup and display on screen. Check out their service extensions.
For a quick overview of Deki Wiki, please watch video below
When I first tried Deki Wiki, everything was clear and I understood all functionalities very easily. There were no surprises, no dramas. It was super easy to use, WYSIWYG editor is GREAT and there is even imaging support! This is great stuff. I totally love this. I have four words to describe Deki Wiki - Simple, Scalable, Extensible and Flexible.
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However, having said all these, organisations are moving toward enterprise content management (ECM) software and such standalone software is not very helpful in providing a single view of the enterprise. You can argue that organisations can build integration layer between these products but if it came as a package, then a suite of such standalone tools that works nicely together producing an ECM effect, ultimately this would give IBM Filenet, Microsoft SharePoint and similar products a run for their money.
