Archive for August, 2007
by Joe McKendrick
August 30, 2007 at 5:30 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Readers of this blog may be aware of my writings on the burst economy coming to fruition through the miracles of online technology. In a burst economy, bursts of productivity deliver far more value than merely showing your face 9 to 5 everyday.
In this context, I don’t know what to make of this report of a New York City School System carpenter who was caught ducking out early on many occasions, thanks to GPS tracking of an employer-issued cellphone.
Burst may be fine for some, but it looks like technology delivers a different impact for many average Working Joes (let’s include Knowledge Worker Joes in that mix). And let’s not forget that time-clock technology has also advanced well beyond punch clocks and cards as well. Technology can be a liberator and an instrument of control — it depends on how enlightened management can be.
by Rob Paterson
August 29, 2007 at 8:36 am · Filed under
Charles Handy, Enterprise 2.0, Social Media, SocialText, Web 2.0
Why is collaboration so hard in organizations? Every organization that I know tells me that it is hard. Hard - all but impossible! Why? Why? Can Social Media help improve collaboration? I have had no success with just the introduction of the technology. Is there something missing?
I think that I stumbled upon the something that may be missing this week as I was struggling with this question of why it is so hard for organizations to collaborate and to adopt social media. I think that the missing link is having the right context. Throughout history, technology has changed before the prevailing context. Two examples:
- In 1941, the French had more and better tanks than the Germans. But they were decisively beaten in days. Why? Because the French’s context for using tanks was still based in static defensive warfare - Tanks to them were mobile pill boxes. The Germans saw them as a raging offensive torrent. Same technology - different context - different result!
- All airlines except one - use the traditional model of mechanical “efficiency” - usually by playing off pilots with flight attendants versus ground staff versus check in staff. All airlines except one - thought that fleet unification or better use of technology - would save them money. Only one understood that the key to the single most important factor in keeping costs low - having the highest fleet utilization rate (Planes in the air versus on the ground - was not through efficiency but through collaboration on the ramp. Their entire organization is deigned to promote cross fertilization and collaboration. A host of rewards and penalties reinforce this aim. That airline makes more money that all the rest of the industry. None have been able to change their context to follow it - of course that airline is Souhwest.
My aha was this - If you introduce Social Media into your organization without thinking about the new context for enterprise - you will fail as did the French and the other airlines
So then what context?
When we use the word “Organization” we default to this model. An organization that breaks up work and people naturally into separate and competing parts. I say competing - because this is also how we allocate capital and resources - the parts compete for the attention of the “father” as kids do for the car keys. At the centre of this context is Budget and the idea that everyone and everything inside the department is “Property” that has to be owned by the Head. Hence my Feudal analogy.
This model excludes all externalities such as suppliers and customers. Departments will rather die that share resources with another department. Of course the people inside cannot collaborate - it is logical and wise that they don’t. For the real aim of the department is not the customer or even the larger good of the whole enterprise but the expansion and or the protection of the department itself. Hence the reason why most organizations in the end default into being self serving. They are designed to be so.
So what is the new organizational context?
I think it looks like the logo for Ross Mayfield’s Social Text. It’s intellectual father is Charles Handy. It is his Shamrock idea made real by Social Software.
In The Age of Unreason (1989) he proposed the Shamrock organisation as a business model. Many have tied the symbol to his Irish background. The shamrock has long been powerful in the Anglican Church of Ireland because of its apocryphal use by St Patrick as a symbol of the Holy Trinity.
For Handy the first of the three leaves represented the professional managers and administrators � the organisational core. This leaf is shrinking in size. The second leaf contained the contractual fringe. Its contributors to the organisation were vital, but they were outsiders. In the third leaf were those including the portfolio workers, as well as temporary workers and part-timers. They contributed much, but they could never be considered part of the organisation. Many didn�t want to be. They wanted jobs but not careers. They frequently worked for a number of disparate organisations. In Handy�s language they were like fleas feeding off elephants. The latter were the large organisations. This was an analogy he pursued in the autobiographical The Elephant and the Flea (2001).
Social Text’s logo sheds for me new light on Handy’s idea or an organic structure whose role id to get a lot of resources for much less cost that by having to own them all like a Feudal Lord.
Let’s briefly explore this idea in practice.
You are the president of a small Public TV station. Your staff is already maxed out with putting the existing world on air. How are you going to make the transition to being a public media company? You have no spare resources. You have only modest internal expertise in the new. You have no way of having God suddenly give you the money to create the new. But you know that if you don’t - you will be dead in maybe 5 years?
In part 2 - I will offer up how such a President could solve this paradox by using the Handy Model and Ross’s Pentogram as a guide. In the mean time - give this paradox a whirl yourself
by Joe McKendrick
August 28, 2007 at 9:58 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0
In the old days, IBMers used to joke that the company’s initials stood for “I’ve Been Moved.” Now, in the era of telecommuting and virtual workplaces, the joke has been changed to “I’m By Myself.”
The burst economy is arriving. A couple of months back, I cited Anne Zelenka’s definitions of what constitutes “burstyness” (bursts of productivity anywhere, anyplace, anytime, as enabled by collaborative technology) versus “busyness” (showing your face 9 to 5, trying to look busy for the boss).
Now, it appears that the mainstream media is discovering elements of this new, emerging burst economy as well, as shown in a new ABC News report on the future workplace. “Some companies don’t care where workers are as long as they get the job done,” the report states. (Stop making sense!)
ABC News correspondent Betsy Stark reported on three workplaces that operate fairly virtually — IBM, Accenture, and Crayon Consulting.
At IBM, 42 percent of its workforce of 350,000 employees rarely comes into an IBM office.
Dan Pelino, general manager of IBM’s global health care and life sciences business, made this bursty comment: “We don’t care where and how you get your work done. We care that you get your work done.” IBM says it saves $100 million a year in real estate costs because it doesn’t need the offices…. There’s a direct cost savings attributable to burstyness.
At on-the-go Accenture, mobility rules. The company has no corporate headquarters, and not even the CEO has an office with his name on the door. Workspaces are reserved and used on a day-to-fay basis, like a hotel room. “Having a big desk as a sign of status with lots of family photos and you know, carpeting that’s fluffy and nice, that is a vision of the past,” said Janet Hoffman, executive vice president of Accenture. Well, in a bursty economy, all those nice accouterments can be part of your home office, if you like.
Next, ABC reported on a funky consulting firm, called Crayon, reporting that its workers rarely meet in the physical world, but meet once a week on a virtual basis.We never met Crayon’s CEO in person but we spent a couple of hours together in cyberspace. “Our belief is if we bring like minds together no matter where they are in the world we can actually create that connectedness as if we’re actually at the same place at the same time,” said Joseph Jaffe, Crayon’s CEO. And, likely, there’s far more connectedness (and a lot less politics) than if employees were bunched together in cubicles at some corporate site somewhere.
by Bill Ives
August 27, 2007 at 9:17 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
IBM has been doing work in the Enterprise 2.0 space for several years. Some IBMers call it “Info 2.0” as seen in these videos but it is web 2.0 inside the enterprise. David Barnes of IBM Internet Emerging Technology recently posted some videos on YouTube using QEDWiki and DAMIA. Starting with QEDWiki, these videos provide a nice introduction to enterprise mashups and how you can integrate multiple data sources. IBM describes QEDWiki as a “browser-based assembly canvas used to create simple mashups.” In the first example, you can see how multiple data sources around nautical shipping can provide complex information in one integrated source. There is a clip on adding widgets, another on getting information from the web.
I saw the predecessor of QEDwiki in 2005, Appliki, which was more externally focused, as well as their early enterprise applications. I especially liked the Unified Activity Management. As the IBM web site stated, “The goal of the Unified Activity Management (UAM) project is to recast collaboration technologies in terms of the meaningful business activities in which people are engaged, both to support the work of each individual person and team and — more significantly — the enterprise. This includes both formal elements such as workflows and structured documents, as well as informal collaboration such as chats and emails that is so critical to getting the work done.” It looks at work from an activity perspective and lets you chart business process (e.g. responding to an RFP) and associated best practices. You drag in documented sub-steps from other processes to improve your process. This goal of this research effort sounds quite similar to the goals of several of the enterprise 2.0 tools that I have mentioned this month.
DAMIA is a newer tool in the videos. As the IBM site mentions, working through a web interface (Firefox not Internet Explorer) , “IBM® DAMIA provides easy-to-use tools that developers and IT users can use to quickly assemble data feeds from the Internet and a variety of enterprise data sources. The benefits of this service include the ability to aggregate and transform a wide variety of data or content feeds, which can be used in enterprise mashups.” It allows you to assemble, modify, and preview mashups. It works with Internet feeds, as well as data from tools like Excel. Thanks to Tomoaki Sawada for sharing these videos.
by Rob Paterson
August 26, 2007 at 11:27 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Social Media, Web 2.0, videos
Here is a new experimental site of mine. Rob’s War Stories. My purpose is to find out how to draw on the almost infinite amount of information on the web and see if creating context in a niche might help.
I am a huge fan of the history of war - my poor wife!! - I have found that YouTube has a ton of great material and of course there are all the books to be read and all the articles to be read. Much of my recent leisure time has been spent watching and surfing. It is very time consuming and I wondered what it would be like to find a War Web Channel that had a personal view and that could put much of the disparate material together and in context.
So this in 3 posts is my first step.
The larger issue for me is how my clients in Public TV will handle a video world where the content is free and is easily found on the web. How will they find value. So linked into this is our work on The War and how we are collecting material from our viewers on their war stories.
KETC will have over 50 6 minute epics by the launch of the Burns series in September and they plan to make these stories and these men and women the centre of their pledge week then. Here is the Living St Louis Team with their 9 minute epic of the local hero Omar Bradley - they can fill 9 minutes like no one else can.
WOSU is working with the other Ohio PBS stations on collecting and playing back their own stories as well. Here is Paul Harris talking about his experience as he entered the previous all white workforce. We take it for granted today - then it was a novelty and he had to prove that he too was a man like all others.
Somewhere here is the future of TV I think - rather than the networks - I think that mavens will create their own channels. The more niche the better.
What do you think of this?
by Joe McKendrick
August 24, 2007 at 5:30 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0
CIO Insight just published a survey of 150 CIOs, asking which Web 2.0 tools they personally use in their work.
Around half of the group say they use Web video, blogs, and wikis. It’s good to know that many of the people that sign off on new projects and budgets at least have some hands-on experiences with new approaches.
Here’s a rundown on what they personally use. Note that only 11% said “none of the above.” It must be strange to work in a company in which the CIO doesn’t touch any technology.
Video over the Web — 54%
Wikis — 49%
Blogs — 48%
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) — 47%
Podcasts — 39%
Social networking (e.g., tagging, social bookmarks, community sites such as del.icio.us, LinkedIn, Technorati) — 33%
Expertise location and sharing — 21%
Mashups — 13%
Virtual worlds (e.g., Second Life) — 12%
Instant mobile updates (e.g., Twitter) — 11%
None of the above — 11%
by Bill Ives
August 23, 2007 at 7:34 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
George Dearing just wrote the Enterprise 2.0 is not a fad. Here are two examples that support his point. In my last post I gave an overview of eProject, an Enterprise 2.0 tool for managing projects and enhancing collaboration. Here are two examples where this approach has worked that can added to the collection of Enterprise 2.0 success stories.
Austin Hardware is an industrial business-to-business hardware development manufacturing and distribution company. They do real old style hardware, not servers and laptops. Austin has 18,000 products, 15,000 customers, and 110 employees with nine locations across the country. New product development is a key process for them but it was siloed in the pre Enterprise 2.0 world. It was difficult for the sales people, who were most aware of customer needs, to be involved in product development. Prior to eProject they had a non-web database that made it difficult to easily share information.
With a transparent web 2.0 style system for managing projects, geographically dispersed teams can connect, everyone can see what is going on, and anyone can contribute. Now the sales people can be involved for the entire process. Mark Jeffries, Chief Engineer, at Austin Hardware said, “before eProject, we could spend 50 hours or more on a project before we even did basic research and scoping or had a commitment from a customer. Now, we have more insight into our projects and can be more certain that every man-hour we spend increases the likelihood of market success. Instead of a belly flop off the diving board, we now stick our toe in the water first and make our way to the deep in with confidence.”
Austin has also used the eProject Dynamic Application feature to put together custom applications for each stage of the product development process, as Mark said, “We have created numerous new dynamic applications that are tied to each stage of a given product development project, from the initial sales lead to the final delivery of the hardware and customer sign off. We refer to this as a man-hour investment “pyramid” strategy. Our early stages are designed to consume a smaller amount of man-hours that help us decide (i.e. review and sign-off) whether the project is worth the next level of man-hour investment. The tiered man-hour strategy actually allows us to work on more projects simultaneously. The dynamic applications themselves are configured to serve as an aggregator of project requirements and information, increasing accountability and providing greater insight into the potential profitability of a project from the get-go.” The ability of business teams to quickly put applications together mashup style without heavy IT involvement allowed them to have the application fit the process rather than the other way around.
In the pre- web 2.0 days, I was involved in a large scale portal implementation with similar objectives at a large UK retail food chain. It was successful in connecting the retail outlets and customer needs with the product development group but much more heavy IT lifting was required because of the lack of mashup style capabilities and much more ongoing manual effort was required to keep the connections open because of the lack of the common transparent workspace offered by tools like eProject
C&S Wholesale Grocers is a family owned and operated $20 billion wholesale grocer headquartered in Keene, New Hampshire with 20,000 employees. Over the past 25 years, the company has experienced strong growth, both organically and through multiple, rapid acquisitions. Within the IT team itself, there were varying philosophies and toolsets, running the gamut from Microsoft Project to a hodgepodge of Excel spreadsheets. Additionally, the lack of a central help desk meant that business users would have to contact IT on a one-off basis in order to request needed features in production systems. C&S found itself in the position of throwing people at problems as they came up, and they were unable to easily answer the fundamental question: what were their people working on?
C&S decided to consolidate their project management efforts with an Enterprise 2.0 approach using eProject. Due to its SaaS, web-based model, the eProject system was much faster to implement and simpler than old style systems. As with Austin Hardware, Dynamic Applications allowed to the system to fit their process in 8 weeks. Then a transparent project portfolio in one central repository allowed all those who needed to know to gain visibility into and understanding of the firm’s time investment in major technology initiatives. Now everyone could see what everyone was doing.
This increased transparency through an Enterprise 2.0 tool allowed for more intelligent resource and portfolio decisions. They could also begin to develop insight into key questions like how long a merger or acquisition takes to complete and if a certain project is strategically aligned with business goals. PPM6 also allowed C&S to use the same system for SOX-like compliance and production change management.
Madeleine Kerr, Director of the IT Program Management Office (PMO) at C&S said, “We were able to rapidly deploy eProject to our entire team, and immediately realized value in terms of improving our visibility into the project portfolio, understanding the time we’re spending on projects and improving the overall project management process. We’re also experiencing great success in using eProject’s Dynamic Application functionality to create customized applications in eProject that are improving many fundamental day-to-day processes within our IT department, such as our change control process. We expect to expand use of eProject into other areas of the company, and truly let data drive our day-to-day processes and activities.”
To me, C&S is another example of how Enterprise 2.0 opens up the organization and creates the intelligent enterprise that can actually see what it is doing. I think we will someday wonder how we worked without it, just like email, the telephone, and the printing press. However, to be successful you need an organizational culture that can handle and benefit from this transparency. Austin Hardware and C&S Wholesale Grocers deserve credit. These tools and food companies are examples for other, seemingly more complex, industries.
by George Dearing
August 23, 2007 at 12:03 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Social Media, enterprise software
KPMG just released a paper titled, Enterprise 2.0: Fad or Future? Nice title, you almost had me. It’s really comical to think a big consulting firm would even hint at the notion of a new set of technologies being a fad. New technologies mean re-engineering, lots of heavy lifting, and lots of human resources, right? Not necessarily. This enterprise is different than your father’s enterprise. This one is lightweight, it’s flexible, and it ignores long implementations. So why all the fuss over enterprise 2.0 and its older sibling Web 2.0? Most analysts (like Gartner) will tell you it’s because this stuff is gonna be big business — and soon.
The dollars set to pour into the so-called ”Enterprise Social Software” market is projected in 2011 to grow from US$ 226 million in 2007 to more than US$ 707 million.
It’s interesting to see the big integrators putting on their best Gen X and Y impressions, all of sudden scrambling to be perceived as thought leaders. The reality is most big consulting firms will ride the enterprise coattails of the major software vendors, comfortably sitting back and cherry-picking the opportunities already seeded by vendors who’ve sprinkled bits and pieces of Web 2.0 throughout their platform.
And for the record, I actually thought the paper was informative, especially the case studies from some of the big brands. What I couldn’t figure out was why the social software categories were so light on content and were mainly geared towards the B2C side. Download the full publication here.
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by Bill Ives
August 22, 2007 at 7:29 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
As I continue to look at products in the Enterprise 2.0 space, I recently talked with Tim Low, VP of Marketing at eProject. The firm began as an online project management suite in the late 90s as part of the Web 1.0 wave. They survived the dotcom bust and have grown significantly recently as they have transitioned to web 2.0. They are now moving beyond managing projects to broader enterprise collaboration around business processes but their PM origins shows through in positive ways. EWEEK named them a finalist in their excellence awards in the Enterprise Collaboration category for 2007.
As part of their offering, eProject is now supporting the integration of personal productivity tools, like MS Office with the their Enterprise 2.0 platform, allowing for broader enterprise access to data that was formerly locked up in siloed applications. This also allows employees to work within the familiar Office applications and have their data and content uploaded into the enterprise collaboration platform. Tim mentioned that this is designed to provide a system of record for the work of the enterprise. At the same time, the enterprise authentication and security operates behind the scene to provide control over this integration.
This productivity tool integration also includes Outlook’s calendar and task functions allowing task updates and appointments to be created in Outlook but automatically shared with the enterprise eProject application. This integration, like the one with Office, allows users to stay within Outlook but have their actions recorded in eProject. For example, you can update eProject tasks from within Outlook, assign time worked on a task to specific days in timesheets from within Outlook, and manage eProject appointments from Outlook or eProject.
Another capability is the ability of business users to create custom applications. eProject calls this toolset for building new applications “dynamic applications”. This allows work group to design applications that wrap around their business processes rather than requiring work groups to conform to the processes embedded in enterprise tools. It also allows them to build these applications themselves without relying on IT, if necessary. Open XML-based APIs allow for integration with other web tools. The project management origin of eProject provides robust support for the definition of these processes. Tim described these process centered as ‘mid-office’ in contrast to the back office of ERP and front office of tools like CRM. The mid-office area has traditionally been overlooked from an enterprise IT perspective. This land of interactions is perhaps the most strategically important of the enterprise as McKinsey reported a while back in The Next Revolution in Interactions. Enterprise 2.0, in part, is about bringing proper technical support to the relatively neglected mid-office.
They have an eProject blog. One of the recent posts was Top 10 Ways to Use eProject DeskDocs. This feature gives you a Windows Explorer view of all the documents in all the projects you have permissions for, again allowing for access through familiar tools. It is part of their MS integration. The post discussed various ways to use the Windows Explorer interface to interact with eProject applications, such as creating a desktop shortcut and having team members drag and drop docs into it for uploading to the eProject app. You can also access files stored in eProject folders from Office tools such as Word. I like this bridge between old and new. It will help with broader adoption of Enterprise 2.0. In my next post I will provide some success stories with current clients.
by Joe McKendrick
August 22, 2007 at 4:00 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, barriers
As a “seasoned expert” on failure (ha ha), I was quite interested to see Michael Krigsman had launched a new blog over at the ZDNet blogging community on the very topic of IT project failure.
Enterprise 2.0, of course, is not immune to project failures, and Michael takes up some of the issues around E2.0 in recent posts — taking Google, Grand Central, Skype, Ning (and Salesforce.com), Netflix, Google, and Gnomedex to task for some recent high-profile glitches and sudden service terminations.
Michael observes that Enterprise 2.0 cloud-based services will be held to the same standards as other utilities we’ve come to rely on to advance our civilization:
“Large-scale business adoption of Enterprise 2.0 infrastructure applications, such as Skype, will only occur when these new technologies can survive comparison with established utilities. Society has demanded that basic services — water, phone, electricity, roads, and so on — must adhere to certain levels of reliability and availability. Likewise, business users expect their software infrastructure to provide high reliability, especially in mission-critical domains. …Such high-profile failures make consumers and businesses wary of adopting Enterprise 2.0 tools.”
Michael goes on to note that “Enterprise 2.0 describes a philosophy of technological and organizational design; it’s not a spiritual path. Mission critical systems, whether old-style or new, must adhere to basic standards of reliability and availability… If you build systems that real people rely upon, then build them right. If your system doesn’t work reliably, then sorry, you aren’t yet ready for prime time.”
That covers external failure to deliver. But what about internal Enterprise 2.0 project failure? As things unfold, and Enterprise 2.0 sees wider adoption as an enterprise platform, it will be interesting to get Michael’s read on what will constitute success versus failure for E2.0 projects — be it failure to deliver ROI, or lack of enterprise adoption, or something else.
Over at my ZDNet SOA blog, I recently took up the question of what, exactly, constitutes SOA “failure,” and would we even know if a project has failed.
Of course, ROI is seen by many as the gold standard of project success, and FastFoward blogging colleagues Paula Thorton and Rob Paterson recently took up the matter of ROI and E2.0. Rob says corporate culture trumps ROI for any given initiative, while Paula admonishes companies to “stop the madness” around bean counting.
Some of the items that can be considered failures in an SOA setting may be transferable to E2.0, such as continued (or increased) lock-in by a single vendor, and lack of adoption of services by other users in the enterprise. Currently, Enterprise 2.0 is inexpensive to adopt, and any failures to deliver may have minimal impact. This may change as organizations come to depend more on E2.0 methodologies, platforms, and tools, however.
by Rob Paterson
August 22, 2007 at 9:57 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
I wonder if social software will really take hold in any conventional organization no matter how great a ROI may be possible?
I am finding that the barrier remains culture and culture always is happy to reject a good idea if it conflicts with the prevailing mindset. I think that the Corporate World is really a return to the Medieval World - organizations are in effect Feudal. I am playing with an idea here but so far I can’t find a hole in my comparison.
It’s a feudal monarchy. There is a big guy at the top and he owns all the property. He has vassal lords, called executives, who have lands, called divisions, who in turn have knights, called managers who have small estates called departments - who in turn have peasants who toil in the lords fields and who have no power. Everything is based on land - aka positions or jobs - and on obedience. Anyone who displeases his superior risks all.
As in the Medieval world there is a God who actually is not real but is used as an excuse for things. This God is also a trinity. He is part - Shareholder Value, Part the Customer and Part “Our people are our most important asset”. As with Popes and Kings, God is the public excuse for action. But the real end is to make the King more powerful.
All the Kings are related - they may go to war with each other but they also look after each other. They are related on boards that also dole out goodies to each other such as pay. They are a class apart from the rest.
As in the Medieval world, there is a church and Priests. These are called Consultants. On the surface they help the King serve God - shareholder value, the customer or the people, but in reality, they usually give the King a licence to do what he wanted to do - Henry the VIII wanted a divorce.
As in the Medieval world, the King and the Priests control the communications system. It is a one way top down system. The Priests write books that tell the people how clever they and the kings are.
As in the Medieval world, there is no room for observable science. Just as Augustine and Aristotle were held up as authorities, so there are untouchable dogmas about HR and Marketing. Any evidence that machine hierarchies are unnatural is quashed. Heretics are rooted out inside organizations and are threatened into submission, expelled or killed.
So on what terms would this world want to adopt Social Software? It threatens every aspect of the system.
For the real business of business is to serve the King.
Show me why I am wrong.
Later I will talk more about the new rebels - the White Companies that are emerging that are bound not by feudal allegiance but by competence
by Paula Thornton
August 20, 2007 at 11:40 pm · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0
The term “Customer is King” is not new — but talk is cheap. Committed action comes in the form of business models that are ”subjugated to” customers, employees and suppliers.
Who better than a monarchal government to understand true subjugation? The British government directs the BBC. They effectively committed their business model to 2.0 thinking 18 months ago.
By embracing ‘on demand’ distribution of content, they subjugate the business model to the consumer. That doesn’t mean that the consumer defines the model, but that the model is defined by the consumer. Yes, that sounds contradictory. The model focuses on consumer needs/preferences rather than forcing the consumer to embrace business needs/preferences (not that there aren’t balances somewhere in the middle).
Even 18 months ago, the path forward relied on “a much greater focus on content management and supported metadata to allow for sophisticated search and navigation”. My professional colleagues at the BBC have always pushed the envelope on these topics. They clearly understand that ‘online’ is simply a channel: “Not a traditional broadcaster with a rather good website but a deliverer of high quality content over the web and other digital channels”.
For Enterprise 2.0, the point is the same. Leveraging 2.0 requires a total collaborative enterprise architecture, for which online is just one channel of interaction. To not connect conversations across channels is shortsighted. If 2.0 is implemented as a technical initiative the digital will not be integrated with the analog.
To repeat again, Enterprise 2.0 is about connections — connecting people, their conversations, their artifacts, and all other corporate resources. ROI should now be “Relevance of Initiative” – specifying how relevant the initiative is to unleashing the power of the employee, by freeing their voices/efforts and connecting them to one another. The initiative must show how it subjugates the business and its resources to the human potential: the most expensive capital investment with the greatest untapped return.
by Jerry Bowles
August 19, 2007 at 6:11 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
File this one under self-serving if you like, but I feel a little like a proud new parent. SMTodaymedia (which is basically me and Robin Carey and a virtual cast of thousands) has just launched a new social community called the Cleantech Collective. It’s similar in concept to our Social Media Today community in that it brings together many of the best, and most neglected, bloggers on the internet on a particular subject (in this case, environmental business issues) and creates an open community around the topic.
The basic notion is that there is a tremendous amount of great information about environmental issues being generated on the web by people who are true experts in the field, but until now there has been no place where it all comes together in the form of one large conversation. By bringing all that great writing and thinking into Cleantech Collective, we hope to build a genuine community of concerned citizens, investors, entrepreneurs, and policymakers that will have have a real impact on the cleantech revolution. Drop by and join in if you’re so inclined.
by Paula Thornton
August 17, 2007 at 5:56 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, barriers
I just had an epiphany doing an interview. The sample culture hasn’t yet gelled, but I place it here for careful observation.
The specific scenario shared (as I’m sure is the case elsewhere), suggested that the primary path (channel) to engage with this individual was via social networking. From my notes: “I specifically started asking people how they knew to contact me and they said, ‘Your name and number are on the whiteboard’”. My thoughts immediately flew to the social aspects of 2.0. If that’s not justification for Enterprise 2.0, what is?
As I reviewed both Joe and Tom’s fabulous perspectives on ROI, I saw yet another perspective — the opportunity to put ROI into context: require that it be justified against current costs. Before you jump to retort, I’m not suggesting that this be done, but that it be used as a defense against the mindlessness of ROI efforts. I’m not suggesting that justification is not needed, but that ROI is simply a horrible means of justification.
So, consider the scenario above. How much does it cost an organization for people to currently ‘find’ the individual above and what is the cost of not finding them? If true ROI were dependent on these numbers (as it likely should be), no one would be asking for ROI — they’d start looking for more reasonable alternatives — like the value of finding someone and the potential ‘earnings’ to be made from shorter contact cycles. That’s the potential of 2.0 — shortening the connections — effectively, providing digital infrastructure to facilitate social networks that already exist in non-digital forms (or connecting isolated digital forms).
And if you run across someone who just really wants to stand their ground on ROI, suggest that to improve your estimate you’d like them to provide examples of the top ROI estimates that most closely matched the results (…watch for the response). Why bother creating an ‘estimate’ that isn’t going to be validated and/or has no consequence? How is an unsubstantiated estimation model superior to one in which we try out very simple things and measure the results, and don’t invest more without desired results?
I’m sorry…someone remind me, what did anyone ever assume they were accomplishing with estimates that are never validated or acted upon in any way? And who believes that they are godly enough to identify all of the economic costs, even if ROI was to be validated? Better yet, who is naive enough to assume that what crosses the capital finanicial stream truly represents total cost to a company?
Do yourself a favor, stop the madness. People ask for ROI because they think that these are the words they’re supposed to use when they need justification. The justification should come from current measures of current efforts — if they aren’t being measured, then that’s where you need to start. Or, you leverage a simple prototype and quantify some change in results. Just do something simple…2.0 is about trying possibilities, not thinking about or justifying the ultimate.
by Rob Paterson
August 16, 2007 at 2:50 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
This picture is of a cell phone being used as a trigger for an IED in Iraq. If we think about who is really expert in the use of Social Media of all types - gangs and terrorists surely live in the top quartile of expertise. At the centre is their use of cell phones. Your local drug dealer and the men who ambush our troops use them as weapons and as communication devices. Pick up phones are untraceable. My bet is that they use all aspects of Social Software but that the phone is the main interface as I think that it will become for the rest of us.
We talk of community - think Gangs, tribes.
We dream that social software will enable community gain power - they are proving it.
What are Gangs or Tribes? Here is Steven Pressfield - the best historical writer living (His latest book is about Alexander’s Afghan Campaign) on his understanding of what we are up against:
The tribe is the most ancient form of social organization. It arose from the hunter-gatherer clans of pre-history. A tribe is small. It consists of personal, face-to-face relationships, often of blood. A tribe is cohesive. Its structure is hierarchical. It has a leader and a rigid set of norms and customs that defines each individual’s role. Like a hunting band, the tribe knows who’s the top dog and knows how to follow orders. What makes Islam so powerful in the world today is that its all-embracing discipline and order overlay the tribal mind-set so perfectly. Islam delivers the certainty and security that the tribe used to. It permits the tribal way to survive and thrive in a post-tribal and super-tribal world.
Am I knocking tribalism? Not at all. In many ways I think people are happier in a tribal universe. Consider the appeal of post-apocalyptic movies like The Road Warrior or The Day After Tomorrow. Modern life is tough. Who can fault us if now and then we entertain the idea of going back to the simple life?
The people we’re fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan live that life 24/7/365 and they’ve been living it for the past ten thousand years. They like it. It’s who they are. They’re not going to change.
Lined up against tribes/gangs is our law enforcement and our military. The hammer versus the network. No guesses as to who is winning.
What are the chances of them learning to be as networked? Until recently I thought not much. But there is progress. Look at the LA Fire Department.
(PC World) Humphrey said the department began looking at Web 2.0 technologies after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. While those stranded at the Louisian Superdome in New Orleans were certainly hungry and thirsty, “they were dying a little bit at a time from a lack of information,” he said. “They thought they were on their own Gilligan’s Island.”
The LAFD uses four attributes to characterize the success of Web 2.0 tools: desirable, beneficial, justifiable and sustainable.
“We can no longer afford to work at the speed of government,” he said. “We have responsibilities to the public to move the information as quickly as possible … so that they can make key decisions.”
Interest in the LAFD’s effort has grown; its blog just logged its 1 millionth visitor this year, and photos on its Flickr account have been viewed 500,000 times in the past year, Humphrey said. The department has made widgets available with content it produces and uses RSS to allow more users to subscribe to updates.
But the most popular effort has been the Twitter account, which now has about 190 followers who can receive Twitter updates from a mobile device. For example, a Twitter will report that a structural fire is being battled by 30 firefighters, or that a car accident has occurred. It reads like a dispatch log of sorts from the calls the department receives and answers.
“The idea for us is that not everyone who is in need of information in times of distress will be sitting in front of a computer,” Humphrey said.
The New York Police Department have just published a 90 page report stating that they have to get inside the heads and the culture of the “enemy”. Here for me is the most telling idea - that the issue is cultural and it drives the need for a culturally aware response.
•The transnational phenomenon of radicalization in the West is largely a function of the people and the environment in which they live. Much different from the Israeli-Palestinian equation, the transformation of a Western-based individual to a terrorist is not triggered by oppression, suffering, revenge, or desperation.
• Rather, it is a phenomenon that occurs because the individual is looking for an identity and a cause and unfortunately, often finds them in the extremist Islam.
Gangs or Tribes give young men this identity. Here is the key.
Here then is the challenge for Law Enforcement and the Military. The conflict is cultural. The organizations are social networks that use social media brilliantly. To catch Geronimo, the US Army had to act like Apaches. To end the conflict, they had to find a cultural answer. This is their only response today.
We have to be them and better. So how and who?
by Jim McGee
August 15, 2007 at 10:55 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Greg Lloyd at Traction Software also picks up on the same JP Rangaswami post that I did yesterday. He offers several additional examples of the value of making knowledge work visible as a simple tool for supporting on the job learning. Here’s one of his many useful insights. Go read the rest.
Learn by watching - Then do
Learn by watching - Then do
Blog446: August 14, 2007 7:22:00 PM EST, Posted by Greg Lloyd
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Each project’s serial file was nothing fancy. Usually it was a few file drawers with incoming and outgoing correspondence, briefing slides, q&a memos, contract actions and meeting notes, all top bound in chronological order - full contracts, formal specs and other deliverables were filed separately. In pre-email days, the project serial file was a pretty accurate snapshot of our interactions with the outside world interleaved with internal notes and memos. We all kept our own date stamped lab notebooks for private jottings.
A day or so of close reading and the chance to ask a few pointed questions to the original project engineer (”You said WHAT to Captain K??”) usually got us up to speed on the pulse of each project - not just the formal status and deliverables. We learned to use the project file to refresh our memory on details before and important meeting or decision - or just to reflect and review the bidding. We learned to use each other’s project files to keep track of dependencies and learn how to handle problems. …
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I know that an electronic form of serial file can replace the old paper trail, since that’s what I use every day. The TeamPage blog + wiki tool lets everyone look over my shoulder - and vice versa - as we tear off in different directions and do our work as individuals or teams.
I rarely need to read any one project in real time, but I know that I can come up to speed quickly, search across all projects, and dive in if I need to. If someone asks for help or sees an opportunity, they can post it if it’s not urgent; add a tag to anything that needs quick action; or IM a permalink if they need me to look at something now. What I can do, all of Traction’s employees can do - only the “Board of Directors” project is private. Board pages or posts - including monthly financials - are cross-tagged to make them visible to all hands when the dust settles.
There are days when I wonder whether one of the fundamental impediments to the take up of blogging and wikis within organizations is, in fact, their utter simplicity.
by Bill Ives
August 15, 2007 at 8:12 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
In my last post I wrote about an Enterprise 2.0 success based on deployment of Traction TeamPage at NHS Orkney in the UK. Here is another example. Shore Bank is a Chicago-based community development and environmental bank holding company. They started using Traction TeamPage informally for ad-hoc threaded discussion, document sharing and editing, and as a channel for external RSS feeds.
After some initial success with more informal usage, Shore Bank’s IT department aligned the hybrid blog and wiki features of TeamSpace with some of their business processes for more formal business process integration. ShoreBank uses a milestone project management process for its IT efforts. They choose to transition the support for this work process from e-mails and a tracking spreadsheet to the wiki. Pages containing milestone profiles, requirements and organization charts are edited over time and displayed wiki-style. They also use blog features as items such as Status Reports flow through the system based on a blog style time order. I have written how MIT Sloan uses blogs for project management. Some other organizations such as Novell R&D use wikis for their project management. The Shore Bank is interesting by comparison, as it optimally leverages blog and wiki features, within the same framework.
It works like this. Milestones are all defined and assigned a milestone specific profile label, a manager label, a status label, a start date and a due date. The associated communication is all tagged to the relevant milestone label or (if a page, like a status report or issue relates to more than one milestone) labels. With 75 or more active milestones at any time, e-mails about them would result in unusable spaghetti-like discussions portioned into silos. Instead, content or activities for each milestone are on a common, easily accessible page. Milestones can be viewed in terms of one or more of the following: status reports, meetings, requirements, questions, and issues.
The IT Projects overall Newspage provides a dashboard view of all activity, organized by content section in the main body. The Newspage also offers the ability see what is happening for any given label. You can drill down for the details. This type of system can be a huge time saver. Al Essa, CIO at MIT Sloan, estimated that his deployment of blogs for project management gave him back 60% of his day by making project monitoring more transparent. It also makes status meetings more productive for everyone as they can come to these sessions fully briefed in advance. The usual in-person updates can be bypassed to go directly to discussion on next steps. Jordan told me about a similar time savings at the Department of Defense which implemented TeamSpace and achieved a 75% reduction in time spent on status reporting. The Department of Defense also reported a 50% overall reduction is time spent on managing electronic communication after adopting the TeamPage platform.
In The Shore Bank example, they were also able to export the TeamPage status content into their familiar spreadsheet format for explorations during the meeting. The system has now been in place for a year, helping to establish a searchable archive for their efforts. As of this time 136 milestones have been completed while another 40 are still in process and 19 are not yet assigned. These efforts can be sliced in a variety of ways such as issues, managers, timing, to get a better handle on what has worked and where the concerns might reside. Beyond organizational announcements, RSS feeds and IT Milestone Management, ShoreBank plans to expand the use of this system to other project groups outside of the IT department. It makes for another useful Enterprise 2.0 success story and it will be interesting to see how it migrates further across the organization.
by Jim McGee
August 14, 2007 at 12:11 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
One of the recent additions to my feed subscriptions is Confused of Calcutta by JP Rangaswami. Recently, he’s been thinking about Facebook and its potential role in Enterprise settings. Today’s installment has an interesting riff on the nature of knowledge management. It dovetails nicely with some of the things I’ve had to say about visibility and knowledge work.
Facebook and the Enterprise: Part 5: Knowledge Management
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Knowledge management is not really about the content, it is about creating an environment where learning takes place. Maybe we spend too much time trying to create an environment where teaching takes place, rather than focus on the learning.
Since people want to learn by watching others, what we need to do is to improve the toolsets and the environment that allows people to watch others. It could be as simple as: What does my boss do? Whom does she talk to? What are her surfing habits like? Whom does she treat as high priority in terms of communications received? What applications does she use? Which ones does she not use? When she has a particular Ghost to deal with, which particular Ghostbuster does she call?
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by Bill Ives
August 14, 2007 at 7:38 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
I am continuing to speak with providers in the Enterprise 2.0 space better understand their offerings. I have talked with Jordan Frank, Traction Software’s Vice President for Marketing and Business Development, on numerous occasions over the last several years and feel that they have a very robust solution for the enterprise. Tractions’s Team Page was named the best enterprise wiki for 2007 by Infoworld. Many people are asking for Enterprise 2.0 success stories. Here is a useful example of how organizations are using web 2.0 tools within the organization. I will provide another in my next post.
The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) Orkney branch in Scotland was tangled up in email to the point that it was strangling their internal communications. Inboxes got filled up with extraneous messages on too many topics, large attachments clogged downloads, version control went out the window as attachments crossed in cyberspace, and the problem of dumping every
