Archive for March, 2007
by Carl Frappaolo
March 29, 2007 at 1:52 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, barriers, guest commentary
guest commentary
Let me start this entry by stating that I am one of the biggest advocates of Enterprise 2.0. I have written numerous opinion pieces on the powers of the Internet and the capabilities of tools such as SNA, KM, search etc. Nonetheless, I have to say that as I sat through many of the presentations at Fast Forward and read many of the entries in this blog I cannot help but feel that many are drinking the Kool Aid.
What am I speaking about? Well, many of the presentations and blog entries speak of Web 2.0 as unprecedented capability that will revolutionize business forever. I cannot help but recall how “web 1.0″ was touted as doing this (does anyone remember vortals?), along with numerous other revolutions - e-mail, EDI, groupware, KM, to name but a few - and I do mean just a few.
The powers of online collaboration, new approaches to search and content intelligence are powerful. But their powers are evolutionary, not revolutionary. Furthermore, they do not change most of the basic tenets of human psychology and business management (in this regard I side with Tom Davenport - see Experts Agree to Disagree). It is naive to think that Web 2.0 will take off all on its own, as so many other blog entries and Fast Forward presenters would have us believe. Indeed, this very blog site has a leader, orchestrated contributors, and a policy statement . Their role is not heavy handed, but it is there nonetheless. Any community needs an individual responsible for activity, ethics and relevancy. To allow truly free collaboration is negligent (I am speaking here of corporate blogs, not those blogs that are nothing more than the inane ramblings of “anyone”. Corporations need only look at e-mail and the degree to which it has complicated legal discovery to begin to understand the impact that blogs can have. I have worked with many regulated industries (e.g. pharmaceutical, defense), that share an implied culture of “watch what you write - not what you say.” The spoken word (not recorded) cannot come back to haunt you. But the written word, whether on paper or a blog, can. Business blogs need to be monitored. Rules need to be imposed. When I suggested this at an working luncheon at Fast Forward, someone challenged me stating “you do not trust your own employees.” How naive. Breaches in security, propriety and confidentiality come intentionally and accidentally. More importantly, we must ask ourselves, are corporate blogs records? Of course they are. Therefore they warrant the same scrutiny and management that any other potential corporate record does.
Perhaps this is why McAfee states “enterprises have to be convinced that the technologies are iron-clad secure and scalable.”
Secondly, and equally as important, corporations that want to maximize the return on Web 2.0 technologies need to control their introduction and availability, lest the “ugly portal in need of a taxonomy beast” raises its ugly head again. Consider this blog site. An individual new to the community may never fully appreciate the depth of knowledge that has been captured here. Navigation is limited to groupings by month and author. Contextual search is a feature that is difficult to “discover”. The power of the search tool is limited. It does not provide half of the functionality that was touted at Fast Forward. Web 2.0 technologies need to be orchestrated as part of an overall Information architecture, on an ongoing basis. As the needs and focus of the community change, so too should the blog site.
Analysts and technology providers that promise the powers of Web 2.0 without simtultaneously exposing the “dark side” – the need to align to corporate culture, to monitor and manage, to design and tactically deploy, do the market a great disservice.
by Bill Ives
March 28, 2007 at 12:23 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
CNN offered an interesting article, Why commercial Wikis don’t work: Crowdsourcing has been a giant hit for the Web 2.0 set — so why won’t it work for bigger, more mainstream enterprises? It covers some successes and failures in group content creation. The main point can be summed up in this excerpt.
“…Web 2.0 sites like Wikipedia and Flickr organize people into literally millions of accessible walled gardens. Each one allows you to take part in tending the growth of that tiny space — that encyclopedia entry, that Flickr “tag. By tirelessly nurturing their specific communities, not by randomly “crowdsourcing,” Wales, Butterfield, Fake and their ilk encourage responsible gardening. Wiki novels, Wiki op-eds, a Wiki Amazon: these are concepts too large, too uncontrolled, too wilderness-like - too unwalled - to be gardens. Either nothing grows at all there, or the good ideas get strangled by weeds.”
So foster very focused content creation and stay away from trying to do too broad and ill defined a topic like writing a group novel on the web. Success can come on a focused site or on a site that promotes and support multiple niche content areas like the Wikipedia. The article gives a nice niche example, the Lostpedia, “a Wikipedia-like site created by fans of the ABC series Lost who are all trying to figure out what the heck is going on, and sharing their notes.”
This also applies within the Enterprise. One example of success is the Intelpedia operating inside the Intel firewall to collect definitions of key work related concepts. Here you get many people focused on specific subsets of content. There have been over 9,000 entries. This is much better than a broad wiki for simply discussing company issues.
There is also the Intelipedia for the US intelligence community. The “top secret” Intelipedia system, currently available to the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, has grown to more than 28,000 pages and 3,600 registered users since its introduction on April 17 (2006)” Both of these applications follow the successful approach of the wikipedia, allowing for niche content creation that is maintained by dedicated users.
by Joe McKendrick
March 27, 2007 at 8:52 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, barriers
Two of information technology’s greatest thinkers — Harvard’s Andrew McAfee and Babson’s Tom Davenport, have agreed to disagree over the scale of the impact of Enterprise 2.0.
Davenport, author of Competing on Analytics and a vocal proponent of the power of IT to transform business, doesn’t think E2.0 will rise to the occasion. He just published an article in Harvard Business Review questioning the value of Enterprise 2.0 to business. He even considers E2.0 to be the “next small thing,” rather than “the next big thing,” as Andrew McAfee believes (and as we proclaim with such persistence at this blogsite.)
Davenport questions whether E2.0 technologies and services “will empower employees, decentralize decisions, free up knowledge, and generally make for better places to work,” as McAfee and many of us here at this blogsite believe.
Davenport explains his skepticism:
“Such a utopian vision can hardly be achieved through new technology alone. The absence of participative technologies in the past is not the only reason that organizations and expertise are hierarchical. Enterprise 2.0 software and the Internet won’t make organizational hierarchy and politics go away. They won’t make the ideas of the front-line worker in corporations as influential as those of the CEO.”
McAfee responded that he “couldn’t agree more” with Davenport, arguing that he, too, argues against the “techno-determinism and -utopianism that I’ve sensed in some E2.0 enthusiasts.” Rather, McAfee predicts “spotty deployment of E2.0 technologies, not broad or deep adoption. My pessimism comes from exactly the factors that Tom describes.”
McAfee, however, admits he is far more optimistic about E2.0, putting it this way:
“My optimism, and my interest in the component technologies of E2.0, comes not (solely) from my inherent geekiness, but from the fact that these technologies really are something new under the sun. They’re not extensions or enhancements to previous generations of corporate tools for collaboration and knowledge management; instead, they’re radical departures from them.”
He also agreed that E2.0 in and of itself won’t “turn our existing hierarchical, political, and busy companies into egalitarian gestalts of knowledge creation and continuous bottom-up innovation.” However, what E2.0 will do, McAfee believes, is open more doors, giving “managers who want more lateralism, egalitarianism, crowdsourcing, idea percolation, self-organization, collective intelligence, etc. a new and unprecedented opportunity to obtain them.”
McAfee also observes that many managers truly want to break down the hierarchies that hold their organizations back, and that market forces will ultimately make E2.0 attractive to many businesses. “If Enterprise 2.0 technologies and mindsets do in fact help some companies get ahead by creating and disseminating more knowledge, innovating more, reacting faster, etc. then interest will grow, and so might new approaches.”
by Bill Ives
March 26, 2007 at 3:23 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Forrester recently conducted a survey that addresses issues important for Web 2.0 startups and Enterprise 2.0. The survey was reported by Captain Obvious and ZDNet’s Web Technology. Forrester asked 100 CIOs (Chief Information Officers) employed by companies with at least 500 IT staff if they would turn to start ups for Web 2.0 technology. Most said no. I assume that most of these people are risk adverse and do not want to bet on small companies for critical IT needs. They would rather look to what the big and mid-size software firms with track records are providing so their vendors will likely be around for a while. This should be no surprise to anyone in the enterprise software business.
When I was responsible for a portion of the KM practice at a large consulting firm, I had many small companies approach me about a possible alliance. While we did software alliances, I knew that most of our partners would not be very interested in taking these firms to their clients. The alliance structure was biased in favor of large to mid-sized vendors that would generate a lot of revenue for the firm. Risk was also not a valued option. They want to see a strong user base and not be the lead adopters. This position made sense given the context and, to be helpful, I did not offer much encouragement to these small firms no matter how great their products seemed. I did not want them to waste their limited resources on something that had little chance of success.
So what is a small company to do if they do not have selling to a large firm as an exit strategy? Or even if they have this goal, how do they develop an initial enterprise user base to attract this investment? Well, they had better find alliances with these large firms. But even here how do they get the initial user base to attract alliance partners?
There is another option, at least to get started and develop a user base, even within the enterprise. The study found one exception. Captain Obvious wrote, “If companies are maintaining strictly direct relations with the end user, and business-to-business arrangements aren’t made or kept to side-dish status, none of the above (negative responses) applies.”
Many Web 2.0 firms are selling to individual users. And many of these products are coming into the enterprise through happy individual users. So perhaps the enterprise sales strategy, at least in the short term, is to focus on developing a satisfied base of individual users who will take your products into the enterprise. This is currently how a lot of Web 2.0 stuff is getting inside the enterprise. Look to getting key web influencers on your side. Reach out to the individual user market. Do not invest your limited resources in high price enterprise software sales people. At least, I have rarely seen this work.
by Bill Ives
March 23, 2007 at 12:40 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
The 2003 – 2004 blog definition debates continued and I was prompted in November 8, 2005 by Ethan Zuckerman’s comments at another Berkman Center meeting to write: When is a Blog, A Blog? Ethan made this comment at a session introducing the blog Christopher Lydon and his team from Open Source radio had just created. Ethan said that they were not doing a blog, but rather an RSS enabled content management system. In other words, they were using blog software to present ideas and collect comments. Ethan explained that most blogs are connected to an ecosystem of other bloggers who engage in online dialog. To be a real blog, the Open Source site had to present more of Christopher’s personal views. Much semi-heated debate followed.
I think the best answer for Enterprise 2.0 is somewhere in between Zuckerman and his characterization of Lydon. An RSS enabled content management system is not Enterprise 2.0. Ideally, Enterprise 2.0 initiatives create an enterprise ecosystem with online dialog but certainly the topics should not be restricted to personal views, even on enterprise issues, as there are many other practical and useful applications of these new tools and approaches. What is your perspective on enterprise blogging? How many, if any, of the norms of the blogosphere apply within the firewall.
by Joe McKendrick
March 22, 2007 at 12:03 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Nick Carr has just posted the results of two new studies on Web 2.0 adoption within the enterprise, which appear to demonstrate that the Enterprise 2.0 trend is growing legs within enterprise settings. However, at this stage in the Enterprise 2.0 evolution, it may be time to start taking a closer look at the business benefits being leveraged by Enterprise 2.0 technologies, rather than obsessing about how many are adopting which types of tools.
Forrester, for example, found that almost nine out of ten of the 119 CIOs surveyed said they had adopted at least one of six prominent Web 2.0 tools - blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, social networking, and content tagging. More than a third said they were already using all six of the tools.
Another survey of 2,800 executives (not just CIOs) from McKinsey & Company also found strong interest in many Web 2.0 technologies but much less widespread adoption. McKinsey looked at six tools, including mashups (not covered by Forrester), blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, and social networking. Investment in or planned adoption included the following: social networking (37%), RSS (35%), podcasts (35%), wikis (33%), blogs (32%), and mashups (21%). Interestingly, McKinsey found Indian companies leading North America in embracing these tools.
Nick’s report was pretty straightforward, without the spicy anti-IT opinions that usually color his commentary. But Dana Gardner, a leading industry analyst, did step in with a response, questioning whether such surveys should be directed at line-of-business executives, rather than CIOs — who tend to look at the technologies as tools, rather than their usefulness to business. Plus, there needs to be more questions asked about business benefits, not mere adoption. We’re well beyond the tools “adoption” stage in the evolution of Enterprise 2.0.
Such business benefits may include “inexpensive global/long tail communication, marketing, search ranking benefits, and community development and involvement,” Dana said. “The same survey should be given to the marketing executives — who may get this more than the CIOs at this juncture. The better question to ask is, how do the marketing and knowledge management leaders in the enterprise want to best avail themselves of these tools?”
In fact Hadley Reynolds just provided some insights on the business benefits from a recent survey of 400 executives now being put together by FAST and Economist Intelligence Unit. As Hadley relates, more than 80% of respondents reported that they view the 2.0 technologies as “an opportunity to increase my company’s revenues and/or margins.”
In addition, the EIU survey finds that more than 75% of executives report that the greatest impact from Enterprise 2.0 will come in “the way my company interacts with customers.” Approximately 40% report that they see strong impacts coming in the way their company is viewed by customers and in the way employees interact with each other and the enterprise. And 40% also report that they see 2.0 impacting their business models.
“All of these survey results point to a strong sense of connection between 2.0 and future business benefits - particularly in offering the customer web-centric channels for interacting with the firm,” Hadley concluded.
In his own blog response to Nick Carr’s news, Ross Mayfield also urges that we focus on the business applications, and supporting grassroots introduction of new technologies.
by Bill Ives
March 21, 2007 at 10:39 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Well, I actually do not believe this and it would be an odd post on an Enterprise 2.0 blog. However, this is the title of a blog post I wrote on May 31, 2004 as I was first getting to know blogs. I had just attended one of Dave Winer’s blog meetings at the Berkman Center where he said that he heard from those who have seen blogs both inside and outside organizational firewalls that the more interesting blogs are outside the firewall. I added in my post, “If the goal is objective and entertaining journalism, then I would agree completely with Dave and, in fairness, this was likely his context for the comment.” However, we have gone far beyond this use of blogs in 2007. The early uses of blogs attracted a lot of attention, as blogs were one of Webster’s Words of the year in 2004. This attention both helped and hindered their use within the enterprise.
There was a lot of debate in 2003 and 2004 about what is blog. Jordan Frank summarized some of this discussion in his post, What is a Blog? A Wiki? As Cesar Brea said in 2004, blogs can be considered as both a style and technology. For each objective, there will likely some unique aspects of the technology, the functional design, and the style. Dave Winer focused on the style and defined blogs as the unedited voice of the writer and they reflected a personal perspective. He viewed technical functions as not as important and the need for comments as optional. Jordan focuses more on the technology as he defines blogs and wikis as “A system for posting, editing, and managing a collection of hypertext pages (generally pertaining to a certain topic or purpose)…
Blog: …displayed as a set of pages in time order…
Wiki: …displayed by page as a set of linked pages…”
For Enterprise 2.0 purposes the emphasis should be on the technical capabilities, on one hand, because it opens up more uses. From a purely technical perspective Jordan boils the tools down to their essence and essential difference and this is useful as we think of new uses. As he wrote, why should a technology be defined (and limited to) by its initial major use case. However, the Enterprise 2.0 technology does enable a different “style” of interacting with others and this is something many of us prize. And blogs and wikis have distinct styles apart from each other. Blogs are more about communication and are author-centric. Wikis are more about collaboration and are content-centric. The open communication of both blogs and wikis is much more than a technology and Enterprise 2.0 is much more than a technology play. It needs to be more than technology to realize its potential and to succeed.
I found that the early perceptions of blogs as personal political platforms often got in the way of acceptance by those within an enterprise or least it limited their thinking about what can be done with these tools. We still have a job to overcome these early perceptions of blogs while maintaining some of their open communication. Wikis seem to have less baggage attached to them and that might partially (and only partially) explain their recent rise in use within the enterprise.
by Jerry Bowles
March 20, 2007 at 11:24 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Kicking Vista at this point may fall into the dead horse category because so many users have already vented their frustrations that there isn’t much left to say. But, fellow Social Media Collective member Zoli Erdos has been having a lot of fun trashing Microsoft lately and my first encounter with Vista is still fresh enough to get my blood boiling so hear me out.
When my old computer died a few weeks ago I ordered myself a new Dell which came with Vista already loaded. I know from personal experience that installing a new Microsoft OS over an old one never works out well and it’s always better to start fresh.
My first disappointment was discovering that my new Vista computer was no faster than my old one running XP–despite having 2 gigs of RAM. Vista is a ruthless RAM-sucker. That’s not my least favorite thing, though.
My least favorite thing surfaced when I attached my Maxtor backup drive and tried to move some old files over to the new hard drive. I clicked on a folder and a message popped up to inform me that I didn’t have permission to open the folder. I tried another one. Same thing.
Now, my wife checks e-mail occasionally on my computer but other than that nobody else ever uses it. All of the files and programs on it are mine. I put them there. Ditto, the Maxtor. So, I think, why can’t I get access to my own files?
After about an hour of fumbling around, I discovered that through a laborious manual process I could claim “ownership” of the files, set permission levels, and open the folder. Sure, I thought, there must be a single button somewhere that I can push to tell Vista that all of these files are mine. Not even those CIA guys at Guantanamo would make a hardened terrorist go through this process for every single one of the 400 or so folders on the drive. I was wrong. Bill Gates planned to make me do exactly that. Bottom line: I’ve had my new computer for six weeks now and there are still files on the Maxtor that I haven’t transferred because I just can’t go through the bullshit. I also have an access problem with an update client that the system blocks about three times a day–although I’ve given it permission at least 300 times. If I say okay that many times, shouldn’t the system take my word for it that I want the program to run?
Of course, there is also the problem that all this access stuff is pointless. If I can continue to click and give myself permission to open a folder that means anybody else who sits down at my computer can do the same thing. Maybe the process makes a little sense in a corporate environment where you might have multiple users who log on with different identities but why punish the millions of home and home office users by making them go through the bullshit?
To be fair, there are some things I like about Vista. The look and feel are comfortable and it feels stable. The file organization is much improved. I particularly like the new Windows Mail client that replaces the old Outlook Express. It also has a decent calendar. In fact, I liked it so much that I uninstalled Outlook, the Microsoft product that I have come to hate most. No more, endless scanning of the archives because I “didn’t shut down properly,” no more five minute searches of the inbox to find a missing e-mail, no more archive rot.
But, if Bill thinks I’m going to spring for an Office Update, he’s nuts. There is just too much good Office 2.0 stuff out there and I’m planning to hold a grudge about the permissions nonsense for a very long time.
by Jerry Bowles
March 15, 2007 at 4:06 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
One of our favorite social software startups (See profile), London-based Trampoline Systems has become the first European “Enterprise 2.0” software developer to receive major investor backing, snagging a £3 million ($5.8m) financing round from affiliates of the Tudor Group. Trampoline intends to use the investment to increase sales operations, intensify R&D and establish a strategic presence in North America. The deal provides further evidence that Enterprise 2.0 is gaining traction with established organizations.
Trampoline is the brainchild of ethnographer turned technology entrepreneur Charles Armstrong. Mentored by sociologist Lord Young of Dartington, Armstrong undertook twelve months of field research in the Isles of Scilly studying the underlying social behaviours involved in information management. He found that today’s business software works against the methods humans have evolved to distribute information.
The company’s main application is called SONAR (Social Networks And Relevance), an appliance that plugs into the corporate network and connects to existing systems such as email servers, contact databases and document archives and analyzes data in the systems to build a map of social networks, information flows, expertise and individuals’ interests throughout the enterprise
“Tudor’s investment gives Trampoline the opportunity to build on its initial foundations and take its place as a force in enterprise software,” says Charles Armstrong, Trampoline’s CEO. “It’s been an amazing experience coming from research on a remote island to being a successful tech start-up. The next stage of Trampoline’s journey is going to be even more exciting.”
by Joe McKendrick
March 15, 2007 at 9:24 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Stewart Mader (Atlassian) surfaced this post from Steven Baker’s BusinessWeek blog, and it really makes you stop and think, especially if you’re old enough to remember the first seasons of Saturday Night Live:
“Stephen Baker tells how he overheard a group of boys in his local pizzeria discussing how MySpace makes money, and why YouTube sold itself to Google for $1.65 billion. He reflects that the boys are “orders of magnitude more tuned into business” than he was at that age, and that to them, “business is a much more vibrant and relevant subject. They know that a start-up is just an idea away.”
Stewart ties this revelation into the rising social software and collaboration phenomenon. “It matters more than perhaps anything else because the mindset of this generation and tools available to it are combining to limitless potential. While most major news stories concentrate on the perceived pitfalls of technology - the dangers of online chat rooms, the dangers of games, the ‘overuse’ of Wikipedia, and so forth - people in my generation and younger are showing incredible savvy - by understanding Wikipedia better than their parents and teachers, restricting their MySpace and Facebook profiles to just their friends and people they approve, and starting great new companies and tools based on the power of their ideas.”
Members of the emerging generation that is beginning to populate our enterprises clearly understand the power and potential of information technology. Not only that, they will expect that their employers (or clients) will also be savvy about the potential of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 tools and platforms. If the organization isn’t savvy, then they will be expected to stay out of the way while they create, innovate, and find new ways to drive value to their businesses.
As my colleague Bill Ives pointed out in a recent post, a Watson Wyatt study concludes that “nearly 50% of the employee population will soon prefer – and expect – collaborative and interactive methods of communication with their employers.”
In other words, enterprises better get savvy about E2.0, because their employees (of all ages) will do it anyway. Lead, follow, and get out of the way.
by Bill Ives
March 14, 2007 at 8:33 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Looking at communication inside the enterprise is a hot topic for researchers these days, especially looking at how organizations are taking web tools and approaches inside the firewall. We have seen some of these studies already on this blog such as the Information Week report that Joe McKendrick wrote about. Jeffrey Treem of Edelman pointed me to a study he was recently involved with, his firms Third Annual, New Frontiers in Employee Communications. You can see the highlights on his blog post, Internal Communications Channels Study.
Here are four of the highlights from the Edelman study in Jeffery’s words:
1. A lot more organizations are using new media than you would think - only they are doing it internally where the risks are lower and there is a more immediate and tangible effect on the business.
2. If I were to put my money on the channel that will have the greatest impact on businesses it would be wikis, as they are the most dynamic of the tools.
3. It is critical that all communications channels be viewed as part of an integrated communications strategy. When this occurs, employees get relevant content with context.
4. When communications are fragmented, employees just get a lot of noise.
He adds, “Internal communications strategy will be a key differentiator for organizations as they battle for the next generation of talent.”
Here is my reaction. Uses of “new media” outside and inside the enterprise are very different and usually done by different groups, e.g. Marketing vs. IT or KM or Corporate Communications. I am not sure that the risk is less inside, just different, and the groups who operate inside are usually, but not always, more risk adverse. So it is encouraging to see the continued inside use.
Wikis may be the leader in the short term because they can be quickly applied to such tactical tasks as event planning and document sharing. I think the long run it may be the more generic open architecture concept (tools to be determined) and composite applications or mashups because they can potentially address more strategic issues. Blogs are also quite flexible but have some baggage from the web to work through. The Edelman study found that 99% of the people know what a blog is and only 48% know what a wiki is. However, that might not be a good thing for blogs as many will have a negative view of them as a business tool. In the blog example, I posted about on Monday it was decided at first to not tell the participants that the new strategy session recording platform was a blog for that reason.
I agree with the third point but we are seeing many initial enterprise 2.0 applications to be isolated pilots. We are not yet at that maturity stage. I hope the fourth comes true. Some of the pundits are saying this. But they also said it about KM. Knowledge management is alive and well but not having the transformational impact some predicted. Enterprise 2.0 has much greater potential. I hope it is realized.
Jeffrey’s blog post also listed a number of other studies and I found this very helpful. Here is the list. Not all of these studies refer to Enterprise 2.0, if any, but that is the field they are looking at. I will try to look at least some of them.
Makovsky 2006 State of Corporate Blogging Survey (May 2006)
Northeastern University & Backbone Media Blogging Success Study (November 2006)
Corporate Blogging Survey 2005: Is It Worth The Hype? (Backbone Media)
Cymfony and Porter Novelli Corporate Blog Survey (July 2006)
Weblogs and Employee Communication: Ethical Questions for Corporate Blogging (Institute for Public Relations, June 2006)
Organizational Blogs and the Human Voice: Relational Strategies and Relational Outcomes (Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, January 2006)
2006 Workplace E-Mail, Instant Messaging & Blog Survey (American Management Association and e-Policy Institute, July 2006)
Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki (Socialtext, last updated in October 2006)
Fortune 500 Blog Project Wiki (Directed by Teresa Valdez Klein of Blog Business Summit and Easton Ellsworth of Know More Media)
The Hype is Real: Social Media Invades the Inc. 500 (University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research, January 2007)
The Voice of the Blog: The Attitudes and Experiences of Small Business Bloggers Using Blogs as a Marketing and Communications Tool. (Jeffrey Hill, unpublished master’s thesis, University of Liverpool, 2005)
NewPR Wiki (contains lists of corporate blogs and executive bloggers, ongoing)
Socialtext Customer Stories (case studies of wiki use from companies such as Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, Nokia, Ziff Davis and Kodak, ongoing)
by Jerry Bowles
March 12, 2007 at 8:46 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
One of the most formidable barriers to the widespread adoption of social media tools within enterprises is fear of failure. What if we make blogs, wikis and other social collaboration tools available and nobody uses them? Unlike the consumer side of the web where the fact that individuals seek out, self-select and manage the social software they want to use is a reliable indication of their motivation to use it, corporations simply have to take it on faith that somebody within the organization will think of something useful to do with these new tools.
Few managers I’ve met in corporate life are willing to take that kind of risk. Social media live or die on the strength of their content and what if nobody produces any? What’s a social media evangelist to do to tip the scales toward success? Two things, I think:
1) Start small with a well-defined task that you want to accomplish, then select the right social media tool to do it–not the other way around. If you want to build a repository of information around a subject, use a wiki. If you want to get smart people sharing their brainstorms on a specific topic–energy, innovation, social media whatever–create a blog network of experts. Essentially, that’s what the Social Media Today site is a demonstration of.
2) Locate potential sources of content in advance by conducting a Social Media Content Audit.
Within every large organization, there are people already doing interesting things and producing useful information around almost any discipline. They may not know each other or share their expertise, but they are there, often hidden from management and each other by layers of bureaucracy. Find those people, give them a forum to engage with each other, and good things will happen.
So, how does a Social Media Content Audit work? Here’s an example that I pulled together for a possible proposal from publicly-available information about a well-known Fortune 500 company.
Starting with the annual report and press releases, I discovered that the company’s strategic and marketing focus is “practical innovation.” I decided to look for resources that could be used to launch a private blog network of experts about “innovation” with a central online gathering point where posts could be aggregated, reviewed, commented on and rated by everyone else in the network.
A little more reading and I discovered that this company has an active “fellows” program that has recognized 30 or individuals for their ability to convert outstanding knowledge and expertise into business solutions for the company and its clients. There’s my first 30 bloggers.
Next I found that company X was involved in an innovation alliance with nine other large and famous companies. Bring in the 50-60 individuals who are responsible for sharing information with each other in this alliance and you’ve got a network of about 100 people before you start. Because they all have a vested interest in making the network a success, it will be.
That’s a fairly simple example created from easily accessed information but the point is: You don’t have to create a working and useful enterprise social network from scratch. The elements you need are there already; you just need someone to find them.
by Bill Ives
March 12, 2007 at 11:48 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Here is an enterprise 2.0 success story from Ken Cohn’s new book, Collaborate for Success! Breakthrough Strategies for Engaging Physicians, Nurses, and Hospital Executives. This book is written to enable physicians and other healthcare providers to reframe assumptions and collaborate better to achieve outcomes not possible when operating in silos. As an occasional patient married to a healthcare provider, I know that both sides need this type of help in the US. The focus on increased collaboration within the organization is a good place to pilot enterprise 2.0 approaches and the work he describes provides an example of a successful start.
One chapter, Building Community and Collaboration with Blogs, outlines an example where Glen Mohr and Ken worked with a major health care facility to implement a platform for better collaboration. I was involved in the very start of this project and co-authored the chapter but it is really the work of Ken and Glen. Kathleen Gilroy was also involved in the project. The work takes place in a major US hospital where a senior advisory panel of physicians faced the task of developing strategic recommendations for the next five years. They met regularly and heard presentations for all major department heads.
A blog platform was created to record meeting minutes, link to key documents, provide a means to record their observations of current work processes, and allow for commentary by panel members on these meetings, documents, and observations. Access was limited to panel members, but the blog made it available on a 24/7 basis from any terminal in the hospital, office, or home.
The blog thus allowed panel members to interact outside the meetings, as new ideas surfaced and new issues appeared. The secure, password-protected site allowed members to engage in candid discussion. The blog also provided a convenient distribution point for downloading and commenting on material relevant to department presenters and their reports. The best came at the end as the blog’s search engine facilitated the creation of final report writing. A large amount of data had accumulated in eight months of meetings.
Panel members could now search the archive to find recurring themes, as well as specific comments and examples that otherwise might have faded in memory or have been too time-consuming to locate in the minutes or reports buried in emails. The report was completed more efficiently and with greater use of all the data to achieve a more comprehensive, consensus-based set of recommendations. As one panel member said, “Having this organizational tool allowed me to recognize important themes that were relevant to the majority of the medical staff.” It also provides a simple and clear instance of the benefits of taking the new, more open, web 2.0 tools and techniques inside the enterprise. It started small and demonstrated value through helping an important initiative.
by Joe McKendrick
March 12, 2007 at 8:47 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, barriers
Our colleague Euan Semple just posted what are perhaps the ultimate and most direct-to-the-point manifesto on how organizations can promote Enterprise 2.0:
- Do nothing - your Web 2.0-aware employees will do it for you, but in an uncontrolled fashion
- Get out of the way - don’t tamper with the innovation and energy of a very tech-aware incoming generation
- Keep the energy levels up - perhaps this is best done by keeping the organization out of the way.
Euan’s message is that Enterprise 2.0 is a grassroots phenomenon that is inevitably sprouting across enterprises large and small. The knee-jerk organizational reaction to such trends is to attempt to control and overmanage the technology.
by Jim McGee
March 7, 2007 at 11:45 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Most of the technologies lumped under the Enterprise 2.0 label presuppose some facility with the written word. I wonder to what extent that presents a barrier to adoption in many organizations? Moreover, I wonder how visible that organizational barrier is to those who are already facile?
I’ve written before on oral vs. literate cultures in organizations (Bridging the IT Cultural Divide, Part 1 and Part 2), using the distinctions that the late Walter Ong introduced. Leadership and power in many organizations correlates with comfort and facility with the spoken word. Those same individuals are not necessarily as facile or comfortable with expressing themselves in writing.
Email doesn’t really count, as it appears to be less public and, therefore, feels less threatening. Even so, we still hear of senior executives who avoid using email directly. (Maybe one of the attractions of the Crackberry is that it provides a built-in excuse for doing little real writing). So too for Powerpoint. It is not a tool that lends itself to literate argument and expression.
Jordan Frank of Traction Software argued a while back that organizations benefit from using the tools in simpler ways (Beta bloggers need not lurk in the enterprise). While I agree with his arguments, they also reinforce the notion that feeling uncomfortable with literate thinking is a barrier to be addressed. Jordan’s suggestions are probably among the best advice for routing around this issue in most organizations.
If my hypothesis has any merit, it does suggest that some of the objections to these technologies will be rooted in emotional fears and insecurities that will be unexpressed and potentially inexpressible. To someone who can’t swim, “come on in, the water’s fine” isn’t very helpful encouragement.
by Joe McKendrick
March 6, 2007 at 4:27 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, barriers
Is Enterprise 2.0 inevitable, or will it face a long, winding road of adoption in the enterprise?
In a new blog post, Andrew McAfee speculates that despite the unbridled enthusiasm we saw at the recent FastForward conference in San Diego, Enterprise 2.0 is not necessarily a sure thing. Since McAfee is is one of the most well-regarded proponents of E2.0 — and indeed, the one who coined the term — his cautious words around adoption issues need to be heeded.
He relates what he told attendees at an interactive roundtable session:
“There were plenty of conferences devoted to knowledge management (KM) systems and approaches in past years, and that these events had almost certainly featured rooms full of enthusiasts wondering exactly what the future was going to look like, and probably paying very little attention to the possibility that the future would be KM-free.”
Does Enterprise 2.0 risk becoming the next KM — a great idea with low, slow rates of implementation?
McAfee states that enterprises have to be convinced that the technologies are iron-clad secure and scalable. Plus, once the decision is made to adopt, there’s the risk of “heavy-handed” adoption approaches by the enterprise. Plus, managers have to be convinced that time spent adopting and learning the new technologies will make a difference — a big difference — in their jobs.
McAfee cites the recent InformationWeek survey (also cited here in this blogsite) that shows plenty of curiosity, but also a healthy degree of skepticism about the promises around E2.0. The problem is enterprises have seen it all before over the years — the promises, the hype cycles, the money poured into technologies that never lived up to their promise.
Thus, Enterprise 2.0 is likely to be a set of capabilities that proves itself both inside and outside enterprise walls in a gradual manner. Enterprises should facilitate the growth of these technologies, but not attempt to dictate E2.0 adoption in a top-down fashion.
Still, McAfee makes a point that he sees the potential productivity and efficiency E2.0 technologies can deliver:
“I want to state very clearly that I still believe E2.0 to be a better mousetrap. Platforms for freeform collaboration capture both the practices and the outputs of knowledge work so that they can be consulted by current, future, and prospective colleagues. These platforms also enable emergence.”
As is the case with service-oriented architecture (also meeting plenty of organizational resistance), Enterprise 2.0 invokes a transformation in organizational corporate culture. Many organizations have hidebound cultures that resist changes that bring about greater openness and level the hierarchy.
A paradox I have pointed out in my ZDNet SOA blog is that the organizations could use SOA the most are the ones least likely to adopt it; while well-run and forward-looking organizations are most likely to adopt, even though they could thrive without SOA. This paradox may well hold true for Enterprise 2.0 as well.
by Bill Ives
March 6, 2007 at 4:20 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
I was very interested in Joe McKendrick’s post on InformationWeek: Enterprise 2.0 May Require ‘Nudge 2.0.′ I first had the reaction, okay Enterprise 2.0 in the IT press but what about the business press like blogs making the May 2005 cover of Business Week. But then I read Joe’s summary and read the actual Information Week report. It was not surprising, but revealing at the same time.
The negative issues for the IT folks included: security 64%, lack of expertise 55%, integration with legacy technologies 52%, difficulty proving ROI 51%. Not necessarily the main issues top of mind for the other employees. This study of IT people constraints nicely with Watson Wyatt’s research that found that “during the last three years there’s been a 400% increase in social media behavior.” Their also reports, “nearly 50% of the employee population will soon prefer – and expect – collaborative and interactive methods of communication with their employers.”
So could it be IT versus the employees, once again but with much more feeling? Could the coming attractions be the Enterprise 2.0 Wars. Episode One: A New Hope, Episode Two: Enterprise IT Strikes Back. If so What will Episode Three be?
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