Archive for October, 2007
by Bill Ives
October 31, 2007 at 7:49 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Here is a focused application of Web 2.0 that makes a lot of sense. Last week I spoke with Umberto Milletti, CEO, and Rand Schulman, Chief Marketing Officer, of InsideView. They have tool that aggregates the stuff available on the Web together with some top subscription services to bring, what they call, “opportunity analysis” to sales and marketing. They aggregate information from such Web sources as LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, and press releases and such traditional sources as D&B, Hoover’s, and Reuters. Today, the good news/bad news for sales and marketing is there is much more information available on people and organizations. Why not leverage the accessibility of this information and the ability to select, distill, and aggregate it to obtain just what you need to be more effective?
InsideView also goes a step further and provides integrated mashups with a number of the top SFA/CRM providers. I saw an example of accessing data from InsideView through salesforce.com. Why not make these old style tools provide you with some intelligence rather simply feed them information? Traditional CDM tools tend to be passive storage vessels for data that you provide. With a Web 2.0 tool like InsideView you add a service that proactively offers you market intelligence in the context of your CRM data. It does not replace CRM tools, it becomes an active layer on top of them.
Having spent much of the past 25 years supporting sales and marketing functions within enterprises of all sizes, the value of InsideView resonates well. As they indicated, you can use InsideView to target companies undergoing specific business changes that relate to your offerings, approach prospects, find decision-makers, and make productive introductions to bypass inefficient cold calling efforts.
Like a number of enterprise 2.0 tools, InsideView grew from the personal challenges faced by some of the founders coupled with the new opportunities on the Web. Umberto was a founder of Digital Think, an eLearning company started in the 90s. They had high turnover in the sales area. These cycles continued, until they realized it was not just about hiring the right people, it’s about giving the sales people the right information to be more productive and efficient. There have always been some information sources on potential clients but Web 2.0 opened many more possibilities. After Digital Think was sold, Umberto focused on this business issue with several partners and InsideView was born. They now have an InsideView blog, along with their website, to document their story in more depth.
There are some additional benefits from taking an enterprise 2.0 approach. Since there is a now a common, easily accessed source for market intelligence, the lines between marketing and sales get blurred and collaboration is easier. Sales people have a greater capability to get their own leads and do their own market research that then can get shared back up to the marketing organization. Salespeople can become an intelligent arm of marketing bringing back stuff from the field that is meaningful to them and thus to many of their colleagues.
WebEx is one user. Here sales people can set InsideView to look for things such as training initiatives, large employee hiring cycles, and off shore development, that can benefit from WebEx services. They can also look for more general indicators like leadership changes and good or bad financial results. Once they access this filtered information, becomes easy to share it with the rest of the organization. By looking at the selling triggers that sales people use, marketing can better understand what the sale people are seeing. They can also add suggested new selling triggers based on new marketing initiatives and what they learn from other. The enterprise 2.0 approach enables a more connected organization.
by Jevon MacDonald
October 31, 2007 at 1:38 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
OpenSocial will be announced this Thursday. OpenSocial is an API that allows for the interoperability of Social Networking services.
I have written recently about how I feel about closed platforms, and that I think open systems will prevail in the long term. Coupled with sensible strategy, openly accessible platforms are superior in many ways.
The same problems have been a speck in the eye of enterprise software for a long time now, and the time is approaching in which it will be time to stand up and begin rejecting closed platforms.
There is some homework to do before that time comes however. Organizations need to be well armed with contracts which require software interoperability, set usability standards and demand certain performance benchmarks be met. The days of all-knowing and all-controlling vendors and IT departments are set to be washed out to sea.
As Google attempts to outdo Facebook and Microsoft through openness, so too will you see smart IT vendors competing by being open inside the enterprise. Smart IT Departments and CIO/CTOs will see their role as stewards and protectors of this open system inside your enterprise. The benefit for your organization is that you can now confidently access smaller, more innovative, vendors who could not previously offer a sufficient set of deployment options to suit your larger enterprise.
You’ve paid enough of your hard earned money. Demand it.
by Rob Paterson
October 31, 2007 at 10:12 am · Filed under
Emergency, Enterprise 2.0, Mobile, Mobile Phones, Robert Scoble, Social Computing, Twitter, Twittergram, University
I think now that the point is made – Twitter is currently THE BEST TOOL for communicating widely in an emergency
(ParisLemon) Another day, another show of Twitter’s true power. Barely a week after the Southern California fires began and Twitter helped get out important messages to people, a 5.6 magnitude earthquake hits the Bay Area and info about is posted numerous times on Twitter before the ground is even done shaking. It’s barely been 30 minutes and already I have 4 solid pages of earthquake news and insight.
Ariel Waldman posted the first tweet about it (that I saw) and from there nearly ever blogger/tech geek/person in the entirity of the Bay Area has posted in on the quake – and many of the multiple times. I knew the exact location and magnitude before the story had even hit the news.
I say again, this is the power of Twitter.
Not only does it get your message out – but it uses very small amounts of the cell network and so can often get through when an overload crashes the system. Robert Scoble sent out a Twittergram to his list including Maryam his wife. With a Twittergram you can use voice. So you can in effect use the cell phone system without overloading it.
I think that the ubiquity of cell phones means that any organization now can have a Twitter Emergency Strategy – you can of course link this to a complementing Facebook strategy too.
So imagine a fire in your office – or an epidemic in the school – or a shooter at your university – a flood in your region – with Twitter, you can reach most people affected and then you can keep them updated – all it requires is that you have a plan and get them following as a precaution. Not hard!
by Paula Thornton
October 31, 2007 at 12:32 am · Filed under
Business Model, Economics, Enterprise 2.0
The relevancy of this topic to our conversations? Understanding the economics of 2.0.
In the Friday afternoon discussion on Media at FASTforward07, I was impressed by Disney’s shift in understanding of the value of intellectual property (a HUGE battle that is most often the fiercest with internal legal counsel). American Airlines has apparently not brought their economic advisors together with their legal counsel (or they have money to burn — perhaps the same legal counsel has advised them that the pilot union’s efforts to gain back past wage concessions won’t amount to much).
American Airlines has brought suit against Google for trademark infringement. The basis of the suit is that Google’s practice of including competitive paid links in page results when someone searches on “American Airlines” (and related trademarked terms) is an infringement on their trademark rights.
But then this is the same company where one of their key staff responsible for AA.com (now long gone, and sigh, a ‘twenty-something’) said to me with deep incredulousness: “Why would someone come to our web site to find a phone number?”
Apparently they haven’t learned the same principle that Bill Gates finally learned. In year after year, Gartner analysts could goad Bill into a near feeding frenzy when onstage with his competitors. One year the shift was phenomenal. Calm, collected, unmiffed, I swear I could feel from the back of a LARGE conference room a near-group-hug about to break out. Bill shared his newfound awareness, “I discovered that this isn’t a zero sum game. When my competitors earn a dollar, the pie is suddenly bigger and we all earn more.” [or something to that effect...it was over a decade ago -- so sue me!]
Fortunately, 2.0 opens the voice of reason so we can point out to American Airlines publicly what is likely being discussed in their halls privately. Where’s that darned company spokeswoman when you need her to point out that pursuing a case against Google (which has already won similar cases of this nature) ”would dramatically increase…costs and make American Airlines less competitive with other carriers.”?
Someone should point out to them…even if they win…they lose.
[Can I mention, they have BEA portal technology? Nuf said.]
by Joe McKendrick
October 30, 2007 at 9:15 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, SOA, Web 2.0
Hmmm. Is Gartner telling us to “make sure there are adults in the room” before launching into Web 2.0 activities?
Last year, when we first launched this blogsite, I speculated that we’ll eventually see Web 2.0 and SOA blending into a common purpose with common technologies. Eventually. In the meantime, however, the relationship between Web 2.0 and SOA is much like the two individuals we’ve seen in the Apple commercials: “Hello, I’m PC… Hello, I’m a Mac.”
In this case, the uptight, corporate guy in the suit is SOA, and the laid-back cool dude is Web 2.0.
That analogy still holds. I’ll be exploring the promises and obstacles to Web 2.0-SOA convergence later today (Tuesday, Oct. 30) at panel session entitled SOA and Web 2.0: Mashups, SaaS, and Collaboration: Putting the Pieces Together, that will be part of ebizQ’s two-day “SOA in Action” confab. (Virtual confab that is.) Fellow ZDNet blogging community activitists Dana Gardner and Phil Wainewright will be there, with some more to be announced.
A couple of Gartner analysts recently weighed in with some perspectives on the give and take between Web 2.0 and SOA. The consultancy has pinned them down to two levels of activity in the organization: Web 2.0 happens in the front office, and SOA happens in the back office.
But Gartner seems to be saying, “Yes, you can go do your creative Web 2.0 stuff, but you better have a breadwinner in the house, doing the real work, to support it.”
In a new podcast, the analysts speculate that all the buzz around Web 2.0 may be derailing, to some extent, all the heady work that’s been going into SOA. All the excitement around various aspects of Web 2.0 may truly be a distraction from SOA. Gartner analyst Jeff Comport says he has seen many clients “start out with grandiose plans… full architecture, high reuse, repositories and so forth,” he said.
“Somewhere along the line they get distracted by things like Web 2.0. AJAX, and the user interface. And it tends to derail the grand plan to things that are more tactical.” This only the latest phase of the decades-old struggle between the forces of opportunistic and systematic IT, fellow analyst Yefim Natis. “The back end part of IT is a lot more conservative, and is in fact is resisting frequent change. It will only accept change only on a regular planned basis.”
Natis observes that in order to support innovative Web 2.0 approaches, and organization needs the reliability and innovation that back-end IT — and SOA — provides. “In order to be able to innovate, you’re going to have to take care of your core system responsibilities, then add to that your layer of innovation. You can’t convert entire enterprise to a fly-by-night kind of enterprise.”
One area where there seems to be growing cohesion between SOA and Web 2.0, as explained by Gartner’s Yefim Natis in the podcast, is between SOA and SaaS. With SOA practices in place, “as you’re acquiring applications, especially software as a service, what you’re really acquiring is a collection of services. Once you have acquired this collection of services, and you register them in a registry repository, they become an asset of the entire enterprise. The boundaries of the application are becoming very thin.”
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