Archive for August, 2007
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, Enterprise Software, Social Computing, Social Media
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.
Listen to the podcast (MP3, 7m48secs, 7.21MB)
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
Barriers, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0
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.
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