I just finished an introductory Enterprise 2.0 lecture with approximately 80 undergraduate students at The University of Melbourne. I asked a question to the class at the end of the lesson – Would prefer to work with an organisation with or without these tools?
The response were as follows:
1) An organisation with these tools – approx 75% of students raised their hands
2) An organisation without these tool – no one raised their hands
I guess just this simple 1 minute survey with the future of working generation says alot about what organisations need to do to improve their internal systems.
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.
There is a growing importance to use Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 concepts in human resources. Last week, I attended and presented at the Inspecht HR Futures Conference in Melbourne. The Inspecht HR Futures Conference brought together speakers covering all areas of HR, Recruiting and Technology to discuss how social media, innovation, culture and technology empower, attract, engage and evolve employees.
I presented how BearingPoint leverage Web 2.0 technologies to assist us in engaging our internal team members through the BearingPoint Wiki and shared some of my experiences and benefits using the tool in my day to day work. Following on, I explained how BearingPoint is reaching out to external information management experts through Mike2.0 where it provided us with an excellent platform to interact and discuss information management.
On Thursday, a few enterprise / web 2.0 enthusiasts / experts spoke at the Inspecht HR Futures Conference in Melbourne. It was a fantastic day with great discussions that went on from using Enterprise 2.0 to learn, professional development, usage of it in HR, general web 2.0 usage and Enterprise 2.0 for collaboration and knowledge sharing.
I had the luxury to meet some extremely smart people from around Australia and I had a great time discussing about Enterprise 2.0 in general. Kudos to Trib, WonderWebby, AnneBB, Joris and Matt from Atlassian. Thanks for the great presentations and wonderful discussions. (If you are wondering why some of the names are more like nicks, its because these are their twitterIDs)
I spoke about how BearingPoint used Wikis internally and externally, our approach and our results. I know some people are waiting for my presentation to be put online. Yes its coming. BearingPoint is putting it up on our corporate blog – NewThinking. Until then, hang in there. Below are slides from Trib and WonderWebby
HBR List 2009 (See the Feb 2009 edition of Harvard Business Review for full details) is really interesting. HBR list is an annual list of breakthrough ideas for the year and ideas that would impact businesses. Out of the 20 ideas presented there were two ideas that is linked closely to social networks (How social networks network best; Harnessing social pressure) and another on semantic web (What you need to know about semantic web). Interesting enough, there were only 2 articles on the credit crisis. If you think Web 2.0 is small, think again.
I believe that most business leaders are really scratching their heads when it comes to social networking, collaboration, sharing, instant messengers, collective intelligence, wisdom of crowds and so on. On top of all these terms there are examples like facebook, digg, youtube, flickr and thousands of other examples to understand. My goodness, even when I have studied this for two years now, sometimes I still feel like its a word game and everyone has their own take on different terms.
Rising above the confusion of terms, look at it from the fundamentals – connecting people together will lead to communication, sharing and supporting each other – this what communities have done since early human existence. With all these communication and sharing done of the web, the information is stored and reusable. Web 2.0 at an extremely high level is that simple.
So to convert it to business sense at a high level as well would mean that if you can connect the most people together and get them communicate and share effectively that would mean the platform is successful. If search and reusing of information is easy for users then collective intelligence and knowledge sharing has been achieved.
Get into this really really cool phenomena. You’ll enjoy it.
The definition and coverage of Web 2.0 has been rather broad and loosely used by many. Sometimes, I get confused with my thoughts on Web 2.0. The amount of terms that are being used is plentiful and sometimes these terms do not have a clear definition. The basic idea of web 2.0 is about social network and collaboration. However, in different settings, different approaches are taken thus different outcomes are achieved. I hope to define some of these terms in a clearer way.
The key ideas behind C2C web 2.0 is all about social networking, for example in the case of facebook. To a large degree there are direct user contribution to Wikipedia and Linux where people consciously contribute and add to the body of knowledge within these networks. There are also alot of sharing of information through tools like Slideshare, YouTube and GoogleDocs. These tools allow people to collaborate and/or contribute for their individual purposes.
In general, consumer to consumer is aimed at connecting people with the same friends, same cause or same interest. Collective intelligence is a very strong outcome of such forms of social networking. In many cases, C2C Web 2.0 could be just for leisure purposes.
2) Business to Consumer (B2C) Web 2.0
In B2C Web 2.0, there are some really famous case studies like Lego, Procter and Gamble’s Connect and Develop and GoldCorp. Read these case studies for a better understanding of B2C Web 2.0.
These kinds of Web 2.0 is really getting consumers to contribute and share their knowledge, expertise and/or feelings towards their products or services for the organisation. The organisation can choose to compensate their contributors with a cash reward or not.
3) Consumer to Business (C2B) Web 2.0
There are also many forums out there that helps people solve their issues for any organisation. For example, Whirlpool is a telecommunication forum for Australians where consumers help consumers solve problems that they have with Telco companies. This is a tricky situation as in some instances, problems can be solved using free contribution from users however, it might go the other way where people start ranting and saying bad stuff about the organisation.
4) Business to Business (B2B) Web 2.0
B2B web 2.0 is about how two different and separate organisations can collaborate and share sensitive information about each other for their own specific benefits. For example, in a supply chain, organisations can tightly integrate any two or more organisations together through an online platform and share information not only about their inventory status or production output but also information about key staff, communicate via a communal platform on issues, progress, updates and anything in between.
5) Enterprise 2.0 (Internal Business Web 2.0)
This is all about the internal social networking and collaboration within the organisation. Tools like Jive’s Clearspace, SocialText and Telligent have generally focused on this requirement from organisations.
Web 2.0 within organisations require more governance and control as compared to consumer Web 2.0. The data that is being exchange could also be generally more sensitive and holds some commercial value. Many of such implementations are also done at a global level where there are different teams working on different things and they require some kind of workspace for them to operate in (think of a virtual team). These are just some of the functionality that is not available in consumer Web 2.0.
Consumer web 2.0 is purely voluntary. Users choose to put up what they want and choose what they want to do. Due to the sheer amount of people on the net contributing, sharing and collaborating, one or two less people who are not willing to join the community does not really hurt the community. However, in an Enterprise 2.0 environment, there is generally a limited amount of resources available and organisations need to leverage these resources as much as possible and the more people contribute and share information, the more successful the platform is. Change management is key to the success.
I think Emiliano Pecis from Oracle has created some good use cases for Enterprise 2.0. Having said this, getting to this point is not only a technological advancement within organisations but also an advancement in the culture and attitudes within the organisation. Change management has to be done over time and monitored carefully. A large scale enterprise wide Enterprise 2.0 implementation could/might not be as expensive as compared to a SAP or Oracle type implementation in terms of software and customisation costs. However, the change management cost will be much higher.
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!
If you have missed my great colleagues Nate and Jay at the enterprise 2.0 conference earlier this year, its all good. For your info, they have presented what BearingPoint did with their enterprise wiki, the thoughts behind it and the approach they have taken. See the slides below for more information!
I never knew Professor Randy Pausch. However I chanced upon this video (which 4 plus million people watched) from the Google Blog post. He passed away two nites back. I am glad I have watched his final lecture.
G'day, Sean here. I am a senior consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers and also a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne and my proposed thesis title is "Implementation of Enterprise 2.0 and its Value in Organizations"
This blog is dedicated to topics surrounding Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, 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 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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