Enterprise 2.0: Getting started

December 22, 2006 at 8:59 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

One of the problems with the discussion about Enterprise 2.0 is that it remains abstract and conceptual. Until organizations see real improvements in performance that outweigh the risks in implementing web. 2.0 solutions behind the firewall, they will not move forward. So how do you begin? What are the specific steps that you need to take to get an enterprise 2.0 project underway?

I have been involved in implementing several of these projects this year. In my workshops on this topic, I suggest that groups find a deep need that can be addressed by a distributed architecture and start there. These needs are often about improving performance that can be directly tied to improved revenues or profits.

Once this need has been identified I recommend prototyping with consumer web 2.0 tools. Most of the features of the enterprise 2.0 toolkit can be demonstrated on a small scale with readily available tools: blogs, wikis, podcasting, and rss aggregation. It is very simple to build a platform for your prototype out of these tools.

Next step: get going. Give prototypers some basic training in how to use the tools and what is expected from them. Emphasize how using the new tools is going to save them time and expand their access to critical information that will improve performance. Get people solving an important problem using the web 2.0 toolkit.

Bring in experts to provide foundational content for the project and stimulate and guide thinking. Model behavior for how you work in a 2.0 network.

Run your project for a sufficient length of time (120 days) so that the group really gets the experience and benefits of working in this new way.

I have used this “recipe” with quite varied groups of people and found it to work in every case. There is a reason that 60 million people have started blogs and thousands are podcasting. These tools really work. They offer a powerful new channel for creative expression and efficient new means of getting the right information. But they are a new language and like a new language, the best way to learn them is immersion.

And in every case our prototypes have propagated beyond the initial small project. People tell their friends and colleagues about their experiences. They won’t abandon their blogs and aggregators once the prototype is over. Innovators in the group start their own prototypes.

Enterprise 2.0 is emergent. So let is begin simply and emerge naturally.

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Business as usual?

December 21, 2006 at 4:14 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

I have to confess to worrying about Enterprise 2.0.

A lot of the writing about it sounds very like Enterprise 1.0 or even 0.0 and feels at times like an attempt to dissipate the effects of a disruptive technology and assimilate it into “business as usual”. Trouble is I don’t think this is possible, the genie is well and truly out of the bottle and I believe we are on path analagous to the one enabled by the printing press. That led to The Reformation and The Enlightement and shaped the world view that so many of us now take for granted. What will our equivalent of The Enlightenment be like fifty or a hundred years from now?

I am not about to make predictions, nor am I big fan of techno evangelism, but I do believe it is important that in blogs like this, and in the upcoming conference, to be challenging and prepared to be challenged – to feel uncomfortable and be made to question some of our assumptions. There is a high degree of collusion in the fiction that is the grown-up world of business with all of its cultural norms and assumptions. It takes guts for people to break ranks with that and frustrating for those who are not allowed to be part of it – but the fact is that tools like forums, and blogs and wikis flatten playing fields. They give voice to those currently unheard and can expose embarrassing silences.

These conversations will happen whether inside the firewall or outside it and in my view it is better to be part of them than not. We began latterly amongst my team to talk of our work at the BBC as democratisation of the workplace. If this makes some people uncomfortable maybe they should consider that democracies are considered by many to be the pinnacle of man’s ability to organise himself – to the extent of taking up arms to defend them – why shouldn’t they work for business?

Would your organisation qualify for Most Democratic Workplace 2007?

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Wikipedia Gone Amuck?

December 21, 2006 at 3:27 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

I belong to another discussion group that has been exchanging numerous emails complaining about the wikipedia article on community 2.0.  It seems that everything is 2.0 now.  It states that “Community 0.0 represents live, person-to-person interaction of the pre-internet era. Community 0.0 is displayed in the conventional social environments of neighborhoods, religious organizations, or schools.” Then goes on to add in all the web 2.0 stuff under the title of community 2.0.  Perhaps this is a takeoff, like the lyrics to “Whiter Shade of Pale.”

Now I think Enterprise 2.0 or Intranet 2.0 serves a real purpose in talking about web 2.0 behind the firewall.  There is a clear difference here. Community 2.0 seems redundant as it repeats one of the traits of both web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0.  I know that Enterprise 2.0 was kicked off Wikipedia for a while and is now under the term, Enterprise social software. That was not fair, especially if they allow such terms as Community 2.0.

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Escape from Blackberry

December 20, 2006 at 9:49 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

Much of Enterprise 2.0 is about asynchronous communication. Blog, wikis, social bookmarking, et al provide common spaces to create, share, and archive information. RSS lets us decide what we get. The break through is transparency but one that makes things more efficient and less of a burden. Here is a great story on what happens when asynchronous tools become real time.  I think things could become overwhelming if everyone felt the need to be connected to all these great new tools real time, all the time. We might lose the control that these new tools give us over communication.

Paul Levy is the CEO of large Boston hospital and he writes the blog, Running a Hospital.  Jessica Lipnack pointed me to his post, Blackberry Cold Turkey. Here he describes his liberation for his Blackberry. I agree so much with what he says.

Paul writes about the bad effects of having constant access to your email when you are away from your computer, “manners disappear. We sit in meetings and, at best, try to look at our handheld screen without appearing to be distracted from the conversation. You have seen the maneuvers — a casual glance towards the crotch where fingers are quickly at work — a sudden excuse to go to the restroom — a coughing fit so the person can turn away from the table and check the Blackberry. At worst, we just put the device on the conference table in front of our face and divest from the conference. Worse still, relationships disappear. A couple sits side by side at an airport, each reading and writing email on their two machines. A child impatiently waits to talk to a parent while the driver hurriedly answers an email while stopped at a red light.”

With RSS it could be worse as we could get updated through a mobile device on blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, as well as email. This is why I disliked IM and why I do not have a Blackberry. People often expected (or I felt oligated) to stop what I was doing and answer an IM. But I may be an extreme case. I even resisted cell phones for a while and usually leave mine off, except by prior arrangement with someone who needs to reach me.  Now that I am no longer in a large consulting company, I do not have IM and I do not give out my cell phone number for business except on rare occasions. There are places for real time communication and there are times for asynchronous communication. We need to have our personal spaces and we need to be able to focus on what is happening right in front of us.  Kudos to Paul.

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When Will The Enterprise 2.0 Workflow Take Hold?

December 20, 2006 at 4:35 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

For e2.0’s value to shine, I think we have to get into the psyche of the enterprise business user. By that I mean baking Web 2.0 into the their work process, an Enterprise 2.0 workflow if you will. What we e2.0 evangelists are fighting is good ‘ol fashioned legacy stuff. Legacy culture, legacy technology, and of course the legacy of web 1.0.

And those legacy effects will always (to some degree) be an inhibitor to Enterprise 2.0. Some folks just aren’t very good collaborators. I’m not sure if it’s a generational thing, a geeky thing, or just a predisposition to despise any new technology. Whatever the case, the non-collaborators and general web 2.0 naysayers will be hard to de-throne in enterprises unless we show how work gets done using web 2.0.

Without getting into an ROI discussion ad nauseam, I think it starts with an understanding of “how” the work gets done. Call it process, workflow, tasks, whatever way you describe it, there’s a set of events that trigger other events. As you analyze your processes, all sorts of things begin to crystallize. For one, you see how the information is used to create a work product. Secondly, you see the consumers of  the information and how they interact with it. And perhaps most importantly, you start to see other ways the information can be used to feed other work processes or product.(think Teqlo)

Let’s go a level deeper and use tagging or social bookmarking as an example. Most folks can understand the notion behind tagging, especially those with a more formal background in managing content. Those folks are used to terms like taxonomy, classification, metadata, and indexing. So when you describe a webby way to mark content, their lightbulbs quickly go off. From a client perspective, most of the time I use Technorati to demonstrate how tagging works. There’s a big search engine indexing stuff in near real-time. Got it.

What’s more challenging is describing scenarios where your client can incorporate tagging in the context of a workflow or process. When’s the last time you saw a delicious widget setting nicely beside say, a sales order? It’s at this point where thoughts (or nightmares) of integration, security, and maintenance all begin to rear their ugly heads. Why? I think it’s because most enterprise users haven’t seen the web infiltrate their work environment. By infiltrate I mean a real integration, one where web 2.0 applications become an integral part of their company’s service-oriented architecture (SOA). And what about the ERP providers? When will they start to OEM this stuff? Doesn’t it make sense to embed social bookmarking capabilities into your CRM system? That’s when the enterprise 2.0 workflow takes hold. That’s when Johnny in sales can finally pull his SAP data and tag it for customer support, and marketing.

Hopefully in the near future playing “tag” will evolve into more than just reminiscing about your playground days.

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