Archive for January, 2007
by George Dearing
January 31, 2007 at 2:59 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, barriers
I wanted to chip in on the adoption dialogue started a few days ago.
I’d classify my post as a volley based on raw experience and very free form, so bear with me.
The thing I’ve learned the most from my own adoption is that your e2.0 road is paved (or under construction) with all sorts of good intentions. You just have to dive in. Have you tried to explain how you learned to use social bookmarking? Or how you use RSS?
There’s an undeniable simplicity to a lot of this enterprise 2.0 stuff. A lot of it boils down to exposure and a commitment to learn.
Think about why you became an expert on information management or blogging. Was it your quest for knowledge? Was it because your a tinkerer? Or was it your personal goal to make a comeback after failing at so many futile KM projects? Point is, our motivations for recognizing the importance and need for enterprise 2.0 are many and diverse. So taking a crack at what drives e2.0 is a shotgun blast at best.
Most of what I’ve seen and heard throughout the discussions deals with the traditional enterprise battles we fight everyday. Business case, ROI, technology alignment with business strategy..all relevant but very tired and beaten down. As the beat down continues, I think you’ll see larger forces start to supplant the more traditional triggers that drive corporate adoption.
Larger force #1 - The New Media Breakdown
What I’m seeing is what I’d call a “new media nervous breakdown”. Clients are being pressured by their customers, their next door neighbor, or Joe in marketing to come into the fold. That fold is the internet. And like it or not, putting the web to work for business involves a lot of what we’re classifying as enterprise and web 2.0. It’s no coincidence we recommend so many Web 2.0 approaches to leveraging the web — often they’re the easiest way to take that first plunge.
Larger force #2 - Big software companies
Like it or not the Googles and Microsofts will drive a lot of the enterprise adoption. We’ve already seen the Google effect on everything from search to web-based email and collaboration. You can only ignore the “Docs & Spreadsheets” link in your GMail for so long. Show me someone that’s used Google Docs a few times and I’ll show you someone ready to carry the e2.0 torch. RSS adoption soon will also take a huge leap when users see it baked into every nook and cranny in Vista.
An as far as tips go, mine are:
- Be an educator. People want to learn. As they learn about what’s changing on the web, they’ll naturally seek out a comfortable starting point.
- Paint a picture and tell a story. Most folks have used Microsoft Word. Show them how publishing to a blog is akin to creating Word docs.
- Start small and build value incrementally. We’re all obsessed with speed, but doing it right the first time holds more water. There’s no stopwatch on you.
- Be painfully clear about the reason you’ve decided to adopt a certain approach.
HINT: “Better collaboration” isn’t enough. If you can’t describe it in simple business terms, you’re wasting your time.
- Let go and break stuff. Assuming we’ve done our job, users shouldn’t be able to mess things up under usual circumstances. Once people figure out they can back out of something and its integrity can easily be restored, adoption increases.
- Show how enterprise 1.0 and 2.0 coexist. We could talk about this one for days.
If you show users how their workflow can peacefully live right beside the new gadget on the block, anxiety diminishes and the exploration begins.
- Don’t discuss or describe capabilities in vendor terms. If you’re telling users the value of what they’re doing lies in “private labeling a b2b MySpace that leverages user-generated content to build community” they’ll probably label you a dotcommer and spew bubble 2.0 connotations.
by Dana Gardner
January 31, 2007 at 11:38 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
While we’re building out lists of five tips for gaining adoption of Enterprise 2.0, I’m reminded of the difficulty of motivating people, and even harder — getting them to change their behavior. If you’ve raised a family, or managed people at work (not that different), you know that making them think any change in action was their idea pays great dividends. A sense of ownership is an awesome thing, and too often missing in corporate cultures.
And I firmly believe that any shift like Enterprise 2.0 is fundamentally not about technology and productivity and management principles. It’s mostly about people and process — and those are affected deeply by ontology and behavior, both individually and in groups. Indeed, Enterprise 2.0’s most beneficial offering may be that it allows individual and group behaviors to mingle and reinforce — or repel — at scale. Enterprise 2.0 helps collaboration and ownership of knowledge scale up, as well as down.
So, given that touchy-feely preamble, the top five things to keep in mind to grease the skids of Enterprise 2.0 adoption are:
1) Encourage people to have fun. Learning is intrinsically fun, and most comedy is based on the sudden realization that you know something. Even better when it’s a group-know. We can all laugh at our collective insights. Teaching is best done with a sense of humor. So to get the sharing going, to get the creation of content — and learning-teaching activity — into adoption mode, then get the fun meter up. Find a way to make meetings fun; really.
2) Take a page from Google. Their corporate credo allows their workers a period of time to work on projects of their own making, or that specifically pique their interest while not part of their regular jobs. This identifies what they want to learn about, and what they will want to teach too. Their pet projects will emerge from the context of their skills, which instills ownership and pride. They will naturally want to communicate about it, even publish. They will have fun (see number 1 above). So give your people time to be creative on their own terms. Then harvest the knowledge and good will.
3) Encourage and allow a sense of ownership broadly. This also plays off of the first two tips. Pride and benevolence are huge motivators, and when harnessed will buttress any moves to exact change in enterprise cultures. When an individual or group expresses pride and a sense of “we did this” and then wants to share that willingly, the organization benefits. Enterprise 2.0 offers the tools to fuel this. By allowing fast, ad hoc delivery of content, knowledge and productive adaptation, these tools can be turbo-charge with the pride of creation and of sharing.
4) Allow more people in the organization to directly interact with customers and prospects. Gasp! I know what you’re thinking. But a major practice, of rigidly channeling who gets to talk to the customer, won’t hold up in the Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 world. If the boundaries are down, and transparency is up, then let the knowledge and exchange extend between your workers and your customers and/or prospects. Let everyone sell themselves and the value of the organization. Give the “conversation” an opportunity to encourage more business by making your business and their business closer, more friendly, and ultimately develop a series of feedback loops that are not hobbled by too thin a funnel of control. If we all can sell, the sales people can find more people for us to talk to, instead of trying to explain what we mean (with another slide deck).
5) Reward the prodigious publishers. When you’ve unleashed more of the creativity and expression from your knowledge-based community, recognize that good communicating on an on-going basis is hard and requires vast self-starting energy. So institutionalize the ability to determine the master communicators, encourage them, and reward them. “Publishing” now comes in many forms, and is more swift, inexpensive and potentially global in its reach that ever before. Exploit this. Companies that produce high-quality information and freely make it searchable and available will be the ones most heard — and understood. Support those who do this best with prestige, financial incentives, and time.
by Hylton Jolliffe
January 31, 2007 at 8:51 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Wanted to alert you to the release of a case study by Andrew McAfee and Karim Lakhani on Wikipedia. Says McAfee, on his blog:
It’s focal point is the articles for deletion process on Wikipedia’s “Enterprise 2.0″ article, but I’ll use this focal point and the other information in the case for a much broader classroom discussion. Using this case, I’ll talk with students about:
* Why Nupedia (Wikipedia’s more formal predecessor) failed to gather momentum, and why Wikipedia has gathered so much.
* Whether Wikipedia’s highly egalitarian and freeform editing processes and policies yield good results and, if so, how this happens.
* How decision rights are allocated in Wikipedia.
* The merits of the Inclusionist and Deletionist perspectives.
* Whether Wikipedia really has become a “post-revolutionary Bolshevik Soviet, with an inscrutable central power structure wielding control over a legion of workers.”
* Whether the Wikipedia community practices the ‘right’ level of deference to the opinions and judgments of subject matter ‘experts.’
* If Wikipedia’s policies are being correctly followed, what the fate of the “Enterprise 2.0″ article should be.
See his blog post for more and for the link to the case study itself - it’s available for free and available under the GNU FDL.
by Jim McGee
January 31, 2007 at 12:06 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
We’ve been challenged to offer tips for gaining adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technologies by James Dellow and James Robertson. Of the responses so far, I confess that I am most aligned with Euan Semple’s, who suggests that perhaps the call for adoption advice is premature. Here are some thoughts on adopting these technologies beyond the general strategies that apply to any collision between new technology and an organization.
- Start with your own learning. You are the target user base. Moreover, these are technologies whose value is not easily understood from casual use or from reading someone else’s account. Set up a blog and start keeping a daily journal with it narrating your work.
- Use Enterprise 2.0 tools to do your research on Enterprise 2.0 Get an RSS Reader and start subscribing to blogs talking about these technologies. Use your private blog to post items from your reader with your thoughts and reactions. Set up an account at del.icio.us and start using it to track your web surfing. Use a wiki to start organizing your research into a business case and plan for your organization.
- Find and enlist co-conspirators. Ignore the issue of resistance to organizational change. Route around it. Find a handful of other individuals you work with to join you in your efforts. If possible, include collaborators outside your organization as well. Examine and reflect on your struggles and mistakes as you learn.
- Ignore the IT organization or co-opt it. These technologies are inherently subversive to the established order of things in most organizations. Don’t fight it, exploit it. Start with services outside the firewall, unless you can find a sympathetic friend inside the IT organization who will help set up a sandbox server to play with. Don’t get caught up in trying to fit in with the existing technology architecture or standards. You’re initial objective is to understand how this class of applications interact with the business processes in your unique organization. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking the problem is about technology.
- Fix a broken process. Once you’ve developed some grounded experience with these technologies, you’ll be able to identify the process in your organization that can visibly benefit and that you have the power and authority to fix.
Absent a specific organizational situation and a specific problem, I fear that most tips will, of necessity, be very generic.
by Bill Ives
January 30, 2007 at 12:33 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
This is a response to James Robertson’s post, Tips for gaining adoption (1) and Euan Semple’s contribution. Now I am not trying to be a smart ass and go for twelve instead of five. The number came from a series I did a couple of years ago on successful factors in implementing knowledge management. I looked at six case studies and the lessons learned. The series is summarized here, Post Script: Summary of KM Stories.
Certainly, Enterprise 2.0 is more complex than knowledge management but it raises many of the same issues, only more so, and we can learn from its mistakes. The list is below. Now these are were not new suggestions when they were made but it is surprising how many times they are not done. I modified items, 2, 3,4,and 11 to reflect Enterprise 2.0 without changing the concept. However, there will not likely be a central Enterprise 2.0 function as in most KM so I added the pural(s).
I completely agree with what James and Euan wrote. Perhaps, as suggested by James Dellow, the writers of this blog can collaborate make a composite list. Of course, a wiki would be a better platform for that activity. BTW here are some good wiki tips from the American Library Association. They are at a more detailed level than these lists but they apply to most Enterprise 2.0 implementations (e.g., 1. A wiki must have a specific purpose and 2. You can’t just offer a wiki to the public as a blank slate and expect participation.)
1. Gain and Enlist Top Down Support to Overcome Turf Issues
2. Provide Strong Leadership for the Enterprise 2.0 Function(s)
3. Align Enterprise 2.0 Strategy to Business Strategy
4. Align Enterprise 2.0 Applications to Key Business Goals and Process
5. Develop a Clear Business Case
6. Design Measures Aligned to Business Processes
7. Listen to the Users, Involve Them in the Design
8. Simplify the Access of Knowledge
9. Develop a Clear Communication Plan to Promote the Effort
10. Involve all the Key Stakeholders
11. Integrate all forms of Communication and Documentation)
12. Develop a Clear Motivation Plan that Aligns with Current Motivation Plans
James tips (and the factors above they most align with):
Create a prototype or pilot (7,8,10).
Use stories to articulate (and capture) needs. (9)
Build on existing platforms.
Use case studies from similar organisations. (yes, but do not simply copy them)
Be passionate about the right things (3,4)
Euan’s cautions:
“Avoid turning Enterprise 2.0 into a “thing” and a thing that can be done correctly or incorrectly with a whole load of people telling you what correct is.” As Euan notes, this was the downfall of KM that it has struggled to recover from and was part of the motivation for doing the six KM cases. If you do all of the above it should not be a thing.
Euan also said, “don’t do what people tell you to do. Do what makes sense, do what works and do what you have the energy to sustain in the face of the considerable challenges that will be thrown before you. By all means have conversations with people who have been around and seen and done related things and who are happy to have interesting conversations with you but that is it. No formulas and no experts.”
I feel that this most important tip is in the spirit of the twelve points above that are mostly process steps and not design specifics. The same applies to James’ tips. Enterprise 2.0 is a business approach and a suite of capabilities that have to fit the specifics of your organization. This is why I do not like how the wikipedia assigned it to a technology. There is no single best way or approach. Any list we collaborate on should be done in this spirit.
I have now looked at the excellent adoption tips from Jerry Bowles and Kathleen Gilroy after writing this post. They each bring some new items to the conversation but all appear to not violate Euan’s caution about making Enterprise 2.0 a “thing.” There are none that I disagree with.
I also just read Mike Gotta’s, 5 Tips for Enterprise 2.0 Adoption. They start with “Define what Enterprise 2.0 means for you.” The other four fall into this mode and are consistent with a process approach and build on what has been said so far. They avoid the “thing” trap than Euan cautions us on. After everyone contributes we should pull the suggestions together. I see no inconsistencies so far which I guess is good.
by Jevon MacDonald
January 29, 2007 at 9:31 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
(Cheesy analogy alert!)
In 1968 in Mexico City, Dick Fosbury did something great. He did the high jump backwards, and confused a lot of people. They called it the “Fosbury Flop”
It took almost 10 years for the rest of the elite group of jumpers to start using the flop, by then it was too late for many of them.
It turns out that jumping backwards over a pole, at 2.24 meters isn’t that dangerous. Sure, to get to 2.24 meters, you have to be a pretty great athlete, but you and I can probably clear a pole 30% higher than we typically could. If we could just go over backwards.
It sounds simple enough, especially if there is going to be a nice piece of foam on the other side of the pole. When Dick Fosbury first did the flop, the mat was not the thick one we see today, it was simply a mat with enough thickness to replace sand as the landing surface, but it was enough to enable Fosbury to land on his neck.
I bet he was pretty nervous the first time he tried it.
In 1968 and for years to come, many would-be Fosburys were just too afraid, many were worried they would hurt themselves, but eventually they came around, by then younger generation of Fosbury jumpers began destroying the records set by their mentors.
Take the Jump?
If you saw someone achieve great success, I bet you think you would learn from it, but the truth is that many, many people will not be able to learn. Social Media and Social Principals in the enterprise are already transforming some of the world’s greatest enterprises, yet so many executives, managers and employees are just sitting by.
Try it once, just close your eyes and have faith. You may hit the bar your first few tries, but you won’t break you neck.
by Joe McKendrick
January 29, 2007 at 5:51 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, SOA
Bob Serr responded to my recent post on the disruptive (or lack thereof) impact of SOA and Web 2.0 on the enterprise, and elaborates on what he sees as the differences between SOA and the emerging Enterprise 2.0 paradigm.
Bob is employing SOA in his own work, but points out that, ultimately, Enterprise 2.0 holds forth a much grander vision for enterprise transformation than SOA can deliver. “SOA is a technology; it is a way to build and deliver applications,” he explains. “Enterprise 2.0, however, is so much more than that because it represents a completely new way for people to communicate and interact.”
As a result, he cautions, “tightly coupling the success (and hype) of SOA to Enterprise 2.0 actually belittles the promise of Enterprise 2.0.”
Bob also provides additional evidence of the low-level impact of SOA, thus far:
“One piece of data that represents the foundation of my beliefs that SOA is possibly being over-hyped are the statistics of SOA based APIs and “Mashups” from the Programmable Web. From
Dion Hinchcliffe’s post,
The growth of mashups continued throughout 2006, as of December 13, 2006 there were 348 APIs registered and 1350 mashups. While these numbers are more impressive than say 0, they are nothing compared with the number of Websites that were created in the previous revolution, which was the World Wide Web.”
I agree with Bob that SOA will be a gradual, plodding, fairly undramatic process for most companies. Over the long run, SOA, in combination with other methodologies and technologies, will smooth the way for greater flexibility. A good way to view SOA is as an internal Software as a Service (SaaS) offering.
by Hylton Jolliffe
January 29, 2007 at 5:24 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Mike Gotta picks up James’ challenge to come up with 5 tips for gaining adoption for next-generation enterprise applications. His first:
“Define what Enterprise 2.0 means for you: I often feel like we’re back in the nineties debating what Knowledge Management is or is not. To overstate the issue - it really doesn’t matter what I think E2.0 is or what some other pundit, expert or analyst thinks it is — or is not. What matters most is for an organization to take ownership of the term and define for itself what Enterprise 2.0 means based on its own structural dynamics, culture, institutions, market pressures, human capital needs and so on. There is no universal truth here (perhaps some common scaffolding but no complete right or wrong). By taking ownership of the term, it allows people within an organization to put Enterprise 2.0 into a context that they can understand and relate to it in terms of change management, transformation complexity, risks and opportunities and so forth.”
Read the rest…
by Dana Gardner
January 29, 2007 at 1:15 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, innovator interviews, podcasts
Read a full transcript of the podcast.
Internet search has been around for years, while seeking out new business partners is as old as business itself. Can finding the right relationships through the burgeoning “Business Web” effectively exploit and leverage the increasingly powerful technologies such as semantic search?
Are businesses on the doorstep of vast new opportunities for the discovery of assets, resources, tacit knowledge and global business partner ecologies? To help answer these questions, I recently moderated a sponsored podcast on the new semantic search opportunity and explored how business relationships and the Business Web can be brought to bear on information overload and ecommerce value discovery.
Joining me for the discussion are Russ Glass, vice president of product and marketing at ZoomInfo, and John Blossom, president of Shore Communications and a noted industry analyst.
Here are some excerpts:
Search engines have become a natural first point for not just Googling individuals to find general information or haphazard information, but to solve real, specific business and sales problems. In today’s environment, with so much information being published by individuals and institutions, search engines don’t necessarily provide the level of filtering that the average businessperson needs to be able to do solve problems effectively.
Businesses are getting much more intelligent about how they use the Web to present themselves as not just companies with shareware sites, but as publishers that provide in-depth information about their activities. At the same time, individuals in business are learning how to expose themselves through that instrument also.
Why bother? Well, our research shows that most people in business start on the open Web when they’re trying to solve a business problem and find business information, as opposed to going to internal subscription services. Certainly, subscription content is still a very important part of the equation, but many people — knowing that companies are out there publishing information on the Web — are going out to search engines to find the answers to their business questions.
Web 2.0 is probably best described as the read/write Web, where there is an increasing proportion of content that’s being pushed out by individuals as opposed to institutions. We have a broader mix of sources and a broader mix of information going out from a range of publishers. It has some default structure in it because of the standards that are being applied, but it’s still fairly loose information.
Business publications and corporations are all beginning to latch onto this idea and to use Web 2.0-style publishing to be able to reach people. We have individuals out there in business with Weblogs. We have CEO’s with Weblogs. We have PR departments with Weblogs. Everybody is pushing out and trying to engage the world in a conversation. Now, with all that information out there, the question is how we structure it. What we’re beginning to see in the Web environment is the use of more sophisticated content extraction technologies and analytics to be able to take those relationships and to present them more effectively to information systems.There is a great example that Don Tapscott uses in his new book, Wikinomics. He talks about a gold mining company up in Canada that recognized all of a sudden that they had all sorts of potential deposits of gold, but they had no idea exactly where they were, and they wanted to get at them most efficiently. Their CEO happened to go to a seminar that was talking about open-source software and Linus Torvald’s development of Linux.
He said to himself, “Well, let’s open-source our functions.” He put all of their normally secretive information about geology and mineralogy, mineral deposits that were on that property, and he put it out on the open Web and asked people to find the gold. He put out a little reward money. They got input from over 1,000 people, and doubled the yield of that property in just a matter of weeks. … The wisdom of crowds.
The Web is becoming a more effective tool over time to classify businesses than traditional industry classification schemes. The competitors I had three months ago are not necessarily the competitors I’m going to have three months from now — or even today — because business changes at the speed of light, as the Internet pumps information around the world and business strategies change on a dime.
In that sort of environment, it becomes more effective to be able to classify companies and individuals through semantics and relationships that are defined through Web content, than to rely exclusively on databases based on long standing industry classifications and formal relationships. Being able to get those webs of competitors and relationships right on the fly requires an environment like the Web, where that information changes every day.
Listen to the podcast, or read the full transcript for more on new opportunities for Business Web search and discovery. Sponsor: ZoomInfo.
Businesses gain powerful new tools with emergence of semantic search [33:17m]:
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by Euan Semple
January 29, 2007 at 12:20 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
There has been an interesting exchange between James Dellow and James Robertson about this blog and whether or not it has been useful. I have pondered through the day as to how, if at all, to respond and I have tried to pull together something coherent - as coherence seems to be something that is felt to be lacking.
However I have failed. So here, in the spirit of small pieces loosely joined are my thoughts.
- There was no brief for those of us asked to contribute to this blog other than to write about Enterprise 2.0. There was no request for consensus or even to be “useful”.
- I was wary about getting involved because there is a real risk of Enterprise 2.0 turning into a “thing” and a thing that can be done correctly or incorrectly with a whole load of people telling you what correct is. This IMHO is not good and is what led to KM disappearing up its own proverbial and being devalued.
- I have actually enjoyed reading and writing for this blog more than I thought and have appreciated the fact that those contributing have diverse and in some cases divergent views. This for me is one of the key pleasures of the web. I can build rich and subtle tapestries of information and ideas and assemble and re-assemble them into my own view depending on context and mood. IMHO it truly is small pieces loosely joined with the emphasis on the loosely!
- If I had a list of five things that I’d suggest people do there would only be one - don’t do what people tell you to do. Do what makes sense, do what works and do what you have the energy to sustain in the face of the considerable challenges that will be thrown before you. By all means have conversations with people who have been around and seen and done related things and who are happy to have interesting conversations with you but that is it. No formulas and no experts.
by Jerry Bowles
January 29, 2007 at 12:19 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
James Robertson has issued a challenge to other FASTForward bloggers to come up with five tips to accelerate the adoption of Enterprise 2.0. I’ll play. Here are my thoughts:
1. Begin with a social media audit. Somewhere on the fringes of every large organization there are people tinkering with the enormous variety of free social media tools and applying them to real work situations. Find those people, see what they are doing and if they’re getting positive results, support them and use their successes to forward the agenda. Social media gain their force through trusted individuals
2. Start small and keep expectations low. All big corporations have had at least one IT integration project that burned through millions of dollars and failed to deliver the expected benefits. Most have had more than one. As a result, the geeks don’t trust the suits and vice versa. Start with something modest and manageable–say, an enterprise wiki-based collaboration space devoted to a specific information-gathering project–with measurable benefits.
3. Don’t spend a lot of money. The amount of money that you spend on a social media project has no impact on success. Free tools like Wordpress and MediaWiki and gmail are as good as anything currently available commercially and they’re far more tested. When, and if, you scale up, then you need to start thinking about more robust features and security.
4. Start with a business problem and find the social media tools to solve it, not the other way around. Saying to your employees, hey, it’s okay for everybody to blog about whatever they want to is surefire receipe for failure. It may fly in the face of the democratic nature of social media to say so, but not everyone in an organization has something useful to say or a particular need to say it. On the other hand, blogs are enormously valuable ways for teams of dispersed experts to stay in touch with what their colleagues are working on and thinking about. We know that even the CIA has a private blogging network.
Enterprise wikis offer a painless (because the process is “social”) and efficient way for work teams and other communities of practice within organizations to gather and share information for all kinds of collaborative projects and to leave behind not only valuable and easily stored digial repositories of knowledge, but a complete record of the processes that created it.
5. Understand the stakes and the risks. Social media are not just extensions of traditional enterprise software that can be grafted on and presto, your networking and collaboration problems are solved. Large-scale adoption of the architectures of participation represent a revolutionary change in organizational dynamics because–by giving lots of individuals a voice and audience through a networked platform–they force decisionmaking to be more transparent, democratic and consensus-based. If your company isn’t ready to start down that route, adoption is going to be a slow and painful process.
Social media will start at the grassroots level–marketing, communications, research–and gradually insinuate themselves into the fabric of large organizations as they prove their usefulness and top executives learn that they are valuable and can be controlled. Sure, there will be resistance from the top but it will fade over time. There is a whole new generation of executives coming up who grew up on the internet. Social media tools will be as familiar to them as spreadsheets are to today’s generation.
by Dana Gardner
January 29, 2007 at 10:57 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, SOA, podcasts
The act of creating software may be going on 50 years old, but it’s still an immature pursuit. A few current events in the market, however, offer indicators that the software-as-lifecycle concept may shove development practices over a tipping point to an era of intense and needed transformation.
A number of vendors and organizations are producing products, services, and methodologies that benefit the entire spectrum of software’s evolution. Web 2.0 principles are having an impact. Software development becomes less a desired result and more a productive means — something that doesn’t follow a risky build-use-discard trajectory, but instead takes on the characteristics of a multiplying, adapting organism: borrow-improve-repurpose. Then keep it up so that the ongoing value of good software, in effect, never dies.
As a result, software’s DNA is changing from a Frankenstein approach to a search-oriented, market-driven, natural-selection, multi-generational “success-of-the-fittest” model. If the focus moves to the process around how to assemble, adapt, evaluate, test, re-evaluate and re-use, then the process is what’s becomes most important. Visibility into the entire process becomes essential. The emphasis moves from disassociated awkward steps and sequences of white-knuckle baton-hand-offs to an anticipated series of related competencies that provide lean, mean yet changing solutions to business needs.
And while we’re at defining, standardizing and refining the practices around software development, perhaps we ought to associate and align those processes with how IT departments themselves operate. Developmental and operational processes that align provide a strategic payback while cutting total costs, and allow even more alignment opportunity — say to portfolio management, coordinated change management, SOA, and continued improvement of business-technology optimization (BTO).
So keep an eye on such market events as Borland’s Gauntlet, 6th Sense Analytics, Microsoft, Eclipse, Relativity Technologies, ActiveGrid, IBM’s Rational and Tivoli brands, Splunk, and HP’s and BMC’s deepening embrace of ITIL v3.0 and the pursuit of IT Service Management as a precursor to advanced BTO. With such activities comes the maturity of IT productivity, development, and operational quality — not each in their own vacuum but as part of holistic best practices and the continuous drive for quality and anticipatory management.
Disclosure: Borland, HP, Splunk, Eclipse, and 6th Sense Analytics are or have been sponsors of BriefingsDirect podcasts.
by Kathleen Gilroy
January 29, 2007 at 10:56 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
One of the reasons I think you are not seeing good discussion about adoption is that there are very few good examples of adoption of enterprise 2.0 services. If our experience is any indicator of what is going on generally, there are a couple of good reasons for this. With each new client we spend a lot of time struggling to get the approvals of senior execs and IT before we can undertake even modest tests of web 2.0 technologies inside the firewall. Once that hurdle is overcome, then we face an even bigger adoption hurdle: what Andrew McAfee calls, the 9x better than email problem. The perceived value of a new web service has to be 9x greater than email for it to gain any adoption.
I think there are ways to get people to adopt these services but the technology vendors are not offering them (nor should they be expected to). We are trying a few things that I will continue to document in my blog but I believe we need more of a user’s community where people who are working to implement enterprise 2.0 inside their businesses are sharing their experiences. Right now the main forums for writing about this subject are more theoretical than real. That is not bad because theory can precede practice and can give us good mental models for how to proceed. But more is needed.
We have had some success with adoption. Here are some concrete things we have done that may be of help:
1. Make the web service very simple to use – so simple that there is virtually no learning curve. For our new learning network web service we are integrating everything into Netvibes. Users set up a Netvibes account and then go to a start page where feeds can be added with one click. Once the feeds are added to netvibes, everything can bee seen in one consolidated view.
2. Tie the service to a critical business process or need and customize it to that need. Our first learning network is being built around the process of conflict resolution for a customer where conflict is an endemic problem and any performance improvements will make a huge difference to people and to the company.
3. Model best practices. As part of our service we include a Learning Director who models how to work in the next and coaches people on how to work in the world of enterprise 2.0. In my podcast interview Andrew McAfee, we talked about the issue of management in the world of enterprise 2.0. On public web, the peer production services are not managed. They grow and benefit from network effects. How then do you manage “network effects?” This is a big open question that needs work. Because the long tail doesn’t scale down to the enterprise, management does come into play: incentives, rewards, recognition are all critical ingredients to successfully managing networks.
4. Train. Train. Train. People need to be shown not only how to do things but why. To do this, we are using a new low-cost web conferencing service called Adobe Connect and we will be offering weekly web seminars where we make compelling arguments for participation.
These are just baby steps into this new world. To move things to the next level, I plan to do two things: write a white paper on this subject (if you have stories to share, please leave them in the comments section here or email me kathleen@ottergroup.com) and help organize a community of enterprise 2.0 users.
by Kathleen Gilroy
January 29, 2007 at 6:35 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, podcasts
I spoke with Tom Mandel of Connectbeam. Tom has been involved in developing social software for a number of years and during our 30 minute conversation we talked about how web 2.0 technologies like tagging and digital identities are migrating inside the enterprise. Tom has some powerful insights into how enterprises begin to adopt these new technologies and how they are integrated intothe existing “IT stack.” I think you’ll find our discussion very interesting. I did. Here’s my interview with Tom Mandel of Connectbeam.
gilroy mandel interview [37:17m]:
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by Joe McKendrick
January 28, 2007 at 9:18 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, SOA
In this blogsite, I’ve been talking a lot about the impending conversion between service-oriented architecture and Web 2.0, which gives us the foundation of Enterprise 2.0.
However, one industry leader appears to be underwhelmed by the “hype” around Web 2.0-SOA convergence, saying it may be “overheated.” Bob Serr, CTO of Parlano, contends that Web 2.0 and SOA are helping to change or streamline the way things are done, but are not yet “earth shattering.” He says that “Web 2.0 might be edging close to this category, but SOA is not there yet.” He makes the following observation:
“Granted, Web 2.0 will change the way we work, interact, and purchase software. We already see this today in applications such as Linked In and Wikipedia. Because of these applications and things like Office 2.0, sure, maybe you could classify Web 2.0 as a disruptive innovation. But what I am missing is the connection between SOA and Web 2.0 and how SOA also, by default, ends up in the disruptive category. I mean, can we really compare SOA’s impact with the introduction of the telephone (one of Christensen’s examples of a disruptive innovation)?”
I agree that the “revolutionary” aspects of SOA are overplayed, and that “evolution” is a better way to describe what’s happening with the technology. “Is SOA disruptive?” Serr asks. “To me SOA is an evolution of concepts that have been around for decades. Software developers have long been figuring out ways to componentize what they build so that they can utilize these components in different ways. The fact that we now access these components through HTTP and Web services is great, and makes programming much easier and more extensible. But is this disruptive over something like the CORBA or RMI or HTTP programs we wrote years ago? …Does this change markets or create new ones? I don’t think so. At least not yet.”
I think Serr may be focusing here too much on the technical weeds and not fully recognizing the ways SOA — as part of Enterprise 2.0 — will stir up disruptions as it becomes a greater part of enterprises. In a recent post over at ZDNet, I explored some of the potential disruptions SOA will create:
Loosely coupled thinking: Ultimately, loosely coupled technology paves the way to loosely coupled businesses. Make way for the loosely coupled business, run on loosely coupled services. Just as businesses are evolving into loosely coupled components, so to are the systems that support them. Many industry analysts predict that the concept of an “application” will be obsolete — rather, our businesses will depend on services that are combined, mixed, matched, mashed and reused as needed. Over the years, there has been a great deal of angst about the viability of the “hollow” corporation, which links processes and services to customers, but produces nothing itself. Thanks to new technologies, what was a linear supply chain is now close to being a synchronous network, affording better visibility and control over processes.
Made to order: Application vendors may begin to look more like “Dells” than “IBMs.” More and more solutions are being built collaboratively, paving the way for the creation of modular, standardized building blocks that can be assembled, on-demand, for specific requirements. Application vendors that play the role of “assemblers” — rather than “creators” — can leverage these components and quickly deliver services or components at reasonable prices will have the upper hand in the market going forward.
Opportunity knocks: SOA provides opportunities for microbusinesses: As applications continue to break down into loosely coupled components, enterprises will rely more on functions provided through Software as a Service model, versus developing and maintaining everything in house. As noted in the two previous items, the “loosely coupled business” or ISV aggregates services on an on-demand basis to meet customer demands. Many, if not all, of such services may be provided from third parties. It is likely, then, that MicroISVs may be the providers of these service-oriented components, perhaps charging on a per-transaction basis. A MicroISV may be an entrepreneur working from a spare bedroom; or it may be a unit of a larger non-IT enterprise as well. Many of today’s enterprises have already evolved into confederations of entrepreneurs and ad-hoc teams on a process level.
Integration, light and simple: Web 2.0 is becoming the “Global SOA.“ ZDNet blogging colleague Dion Hinchcliffe made this observation last year, and as Web 2.0 and SOA converge, we’re seeing this come to pass. This convergence has interesting implications for companies seeking faster and more cost effective ways to integrate their disparate silos of systems and information. As Dion observed: “Live users are still the manual integration point of our systems far too often, and now it’s getting easier and easier for the average person to direct software do the integration automatically.”
SOA will increase outsourcing. SOA will suppress outsourcing. Last July, IT outsourcing company Accenture announced it plans to invest $450 million over the next three years in the development of SOA applications. What do they know? Sure, many companies will pull aspects of development in-house, since SOA can make integration so quick and painless. But SOA also offers major opportunities for outsourcing arrangements. First, busy IT shops — especially those with large enterprise systems — may not have enough human resources to effectively deploy SOAs. Second, infrastructures based on SOA will lower the barrier of entry for outsourcing providers, which will energize the market. Third, the growing standardization and “hot-swappability” of SOA components makes it easier to outsource — perhaps as SaaS — pieces of the IT infrastructure.
by James Robertson
January 28, 2007 at 6:23 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
James Dellow has been following this group blog, and has published an entry on his blog titled Chicken AND egg. It his post, he accuses us of each focusing on just one part of the overall equation, and not on the whole picture:
To me, this is approach of one or the other is a mistake. As in the old chicken and egg problem, the trick to Enterprise 2.0 is all about dealing with both sides of the equation at the same time.
James is right. While we’ve been writing some good stuff, we’ve not yet engaged in a meaningful conversation to hammer out some consensus approaches. Instead, we’ve all be writing from our philosophical “corners” (including me).
So in the spirit of “walking the walk”, I hereby challenge everyone posting on this blog to publish their list of 5 tips for gaining adoption of enterprise 2.0, both at the organisational and individual level. Here’s my list to start the ball rolling:
- Create a prototype or pilot. Start by identifying an important group of staff (ideally at the front-line), and work with them to create a prototype of a solution that would greatly enhance their ability to do their jobs. Use this to showcase potential improvements, and to “sell” it throughout the rest of the organisation.
- Use stories to articulate (and capture) needs. Storytelling is an extremely effective way of communicate the day-to-day issues that staff are encountering. It’s also a great way of capturing these needs, to help guide the development of appropriate solutions.
- Build on existing platforms. Use existing platforms, such as the intranet, as the starting point for enterprise 2.0 enhancements. Build incrementally to deliver immediate improvements, and avoid creating yet another platform or system.
- Use case studies from similar organisations. Adoption of new technologies and processes is extremely dependent on organisational culture. So unless you are a global consulting firm, avoid using case studies from these types or organisations (or technology companies for that matter). Instead, find similar organisations and find out what they have done.
- Be passionate about the right things. Too often we become passionate about the solution (or worse, the technology). Instead, we should be passionate about solving the problem, or meeting the need. Only then will we get the buy-in that we are looking for.
So, over to: Rod Boothby, Jerry Bowles, George Dearing, Dana Gardner, Kathleen Gilroy, Bill Ives, Jevon MacDonald, Jim McGee, Joe McKendrick and Euan Semple. What are your five tips for gaining adoption?
by Joe McKendrick
January 26, 2007 at 11:30 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, SOA
Talk about growing pains. A new generation of technologies, born in this century, are out of the crib and getting into every nook and cranny of the enterprise, knocking over everything that isn’t nailed down.
Why are the ‘2.0s’ — Web 2.0, Office 2.0, and Enterprise 2.0 — gaining so much mindshare within enterprises? Sure, these initiatives are merry mashups and wild wikis that make computing fun for techies and non-techies alike. But they represent the future of business as well. David Precopio says it all in a new post, noting that the 2.0s “are real and will drive how organizations communicate with customers and business partners now and in the future. For many companies, these 2.0 technologies will determine whether they are in business in five years.”
Enterprise applications and data can no longer be locked away within the walls of a silo within an enterprise. While it may be costly to open up these silos, it may be far more costly to leave them locked up.
Service oriented architecture and business process management are part of the answer to unlocking legacy applications, but alone, their progress has been evolutionary. When combined with the 2.0s, however, such initiatives are going to have a profound impact on business survival and success, Precopio explains.
(Slight digression here… we’re not going to acknowledge the “SOA 2.0” designation that some vendors such as Oracle have come up with. SOA is SOA is SOA.)
Precopio puts SOA, BPM, EAI, and Web 2.0 into a new emerging category he calls “Enterprise Web 2.0,” or EW2.0. EW2.0 looks at three tiers:
- Applications and application integration
- Connectivity (Internet, wireless, network)
- End-point technologies such as PDA’s and laptops
Applications are the foundation of EW2.0, Precopio says: “This includes portal, wikis, mash-ups, and Web technologies.” Connectivity is the “always on” component of EW2.0 — which is what users inside and outside the enterprise now take for granted. Finally, the endpoint devices — be they laptops, PDAs, hybrid phones, or iPhones (or whatever Apple ends up calling them). Enterprises need to consider all types of devices in their end-user access strategies.
The sooner companies decide on their strategies around EW2.0, the better prepared they will be for this new era. As Precopio puts it:
“Companies need a framework to help define organizational goals pertaining to EW2.0. With these goals, companies can list and prioritize applications. Then based on their understanding of the three main areas of EW2.0, companies can make informed decisions on whether to purchase or build, who can access, and how applications will be delivered.”
Customers and consumers will expect nothing less. Employees will expect nothing less. BUsiness partners will expect nothing less. All eyes will be on the CIO to deliver an always-on, networked system that provides the information that is needed, regardless of where it was originally stored and managed.
by Kathleen Gilroy
January 26, 2007 at 10:06 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
[cross posted on and Future of Communities]
In the past couple of days I have had conversations with two people representing different enterprise 2.0 services (iUpload and ConnectBeam) about managing the online profile. In thinking about building second generation web communities, I have come to believe that the online profile is at the heart the new web. In the search economy, you need a dynamic digital identity. It is the means by which the right people find you and then connect with you. But in the world of web services, where oh where does my profile live? I know have mini profiles all over the place: I started with my blog and added a profile on Linked In. I thought Linked In might provide me with a good home for my profile but when the fee for service elements were added to Linked In, the really useful aspects of hosting my profile there were lost — people can’t find me unless they pay for a higher level of service. I’ve got mini profiles on Flickr and del.icio.us but they can’t act as profile central. And I’ve just added a new profile to our new Otter Networks service which is built on iUpload and Netvibes.
What I need is a place for my profile that can be plugged into any web service I join. And by plugged in I mean can dynamically draw text, bookmarks, images, and videos from all of these services and build them into a dynamic view of what’s going on now. And I’m not dealing with the issue of residing “inside” an enterprise.
I’ve been interviewing people for a paper and podcast series on new communities and when I ask them about profiles, this is what I hear:
We connect into Active Directory but that is primarily for authority and authentication. We recommend that you build a rich profile on our service and at some point in the future we will integrate this rich profiling back into the enterprise directories.
Is this really how it is going to go? When and how will these things be integrated in a way that really does provide me with a rich, dynamic digital identity that can cross web services as I move in and out of communities of interest and practice?
by James Robertson
January 25, 2007 at 6:17 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Jevon MacDonald has written a great post on this blog titled Enterprise 2.0: Where do I start? In it, he argues that organisations should start by learning more about themselves and looking for internal opportunities, before rushing down the consultant or vendor route:
Check your ego: Here is the painful part, and one of the secrets. The baseline requirement of Enterprise 2.0 is to learn to let go and to realize that you must learn to trust those around you before you yourself will earn their trust.
I’m going to go one step beyond this to say: organisations don’t need enterprise 2.0. Implementing a new technology (or set of technologies) won’t drive organisational change or improvements, no matter how sexy or new they are.
So my answer to the question “where do I start?” would focus on two things:
- People: spend time in the organisation understanding what the needs and issues of staff are. Don’t talk about enterprise 2.0 (they don’t care or understand), but take the time to listen to what people’s “pain points” are.
- Business needs: work with senior and middle management to identify strategic needs and directions. At the end of the day, the right points to start are those that will have the biggest impact on the organisation.
Of course, we go out into the organisation with an understanding of how enterprise 2.0 can help, and where it may fit in. This will help us to take a new perspective on how technology can support day-to-day business needs. (We also need to recognise that we will find as many situations where enterprise 2.0 isn’t relevent, but the needs are just as great.)
Time and time again, I’ve seen organisations get tangled up when it comes to defining an information management strategy for the whole business. The cause? Starting with technology.
It’s easy to get caught up in questions such as: do I start with content management or document management? Should we be doing enterprise 2.0? Should we be creating an ECM platform?
These questions are a trap, because technology was never the real issue. The real issues are staff and organisational needs. So we should start there, prioritise according to business strategy, and then slot in the appropriate technology when required.
Enterprise 2.0 is about taking a new perspective on the organisation, not on a set of technologies. That’s what’s so exciting, if we can make it all work.
by Jevon MacDonald
January 24, 2007 at 11:38 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
You may be wondering, “who can help my company adopt some of these new ideas and technologies that we are hearing about“?
If you are involved in running any sort of moderately sized organization, you can be sure that in the next year you are going to be approached by some form of Enterprise 2.0 Consulting company or group within a large firm.
Do you need them? Do you have to wait for them to come to you, or can you start right now? There is no time to lose. I contend that you cannot wait for a hero to ride in, you must lead the way.
Some tips:
- Look inside: Chances are you have at least a few clued-in people. Take them to lunch and and give them some space to share their ideas. If they are really on to something, try to free up some of their workday so that they can experiment
- Listen carefully: There are two conversations going on right now, one about Technology, and one about a Business Ideology. If technology isn’t your thing, then start moving forward with new business ideas and the right technology will emerge, and if you are pegged as a technology person then start opening up the world of low cost options to your colleagues.
- Don’t rush: Major shifts in corporate structure and direction are painful and drawn out exercises. Instead of feeling the need to act, focus instead on assimilating relevant new ideas and contextualizing them around your own strategy.
- Act fast: Low cost and low friction opportunities are now available to everyone, learn to try small. If a transformation is going to take place successfully in your organization, it will be through thousands of small efforts, not one large push.
- Check your ego: Here is the painful part, and one of the secrets. The baseline requirement of Enterprise 2.0 is to learn to let go and to realize that you must learn to trust those around you before you yourself will earn their trust.
- Le
