Back to Mike’s stuff and it is excellent. He covered some topics that should be considered when formulating Enterprise 2.0 plans.The first concerns Sharepoint. Mike writes that many people are using Sharepoint for “valid reasons unrelated to E2.0 and are “ok” with undertaking extensive customization or adding specific partners (e.g., NewsGator) to augment what SharePoint has in terms of E2.0 capabilities.”This is move is actually aligned with Sharepoint’s current strategy of linking to best of breed E 2.0 partners as many have written about. Mike appears to feel that they need to move beyond this reliance and writes that the next release will be a tipping point for Microsoft’s social computing efforts.
He may likely be right and I look forward to what happens. In the meanwhile, if you want to use Sharepoint, there are many systems integrators thankful for the opportunity to help you (given the decline of other I work) and third party vendors ready to supplement Sharepoint. Many of them first saw Sharepoint as a competitor and now see it as a platform to provide more space for their products (e.g. The Sharepoint Sessions Revisited – AIIM Seminar).
I especially like his next planning factor – Think “Adoption”, Not “Deployment.” It is always 90% people and 10% technology for enterprise 2.0.
The third is interesting. He notes how many point vendors have expanded their products suites (e.g., blog platforms have wikis and visa versa and more). This is smart move on their part but as Mike points out, it creates overlap issues. The movement is toward platforms and not point solutions. This will help to reduce content silos but it will also likely reduce the players.
There is much more and I will not repeat everything but recommend that you read the original. Mike closes with enterprise twitter as the space to watch and links to his Enterprise Versions Of Twitter. Here is a post, Enterprise Microblogging or Micromessaging, that links to some of my thoughts on the vendors and issues. I think that twitter functionality will follow the trend described by Mike and become part of a platform, rather than stay a separate function. However, there will remain room for some of the best standalone vendors.
January 11, 2009 at 10:24 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
I have gone back to using my old GrandCentral account recently. It is truly a great service, one of the first that treats VOIP as a consumer thing rather than simply an enterprise tool. GrandCentral gives me one phone number (in my case, a San Francisco number) and it gives me a degree of control and ownership over that number that I can’t get anywhere else.
That level of personal control and ownership over my phone line and number is a new phenomenon, and I am starting to wonder what the true impact will be. The phone was originally a shared-service model, starting with party-lines and then the wide availability of direct household lines. A few shifts have already taken place so far that make using the phone a much more personal experience, and there are a few coming changes that are going to have an even bigger impact.
The first major change that has occurred is pretty obvious: Cellphone adoption continues to grow. My nieces and nephews all have them, and their mom and dad both have cellphones. It is is how the family keeps in touch and they are the devices that the kids use to manage their social lives. An average of 188 TXT messages per month are sent by each user in the United States. That number will probably triple or better in the coming 3 years as people shy away from using the phone as an interruptive voice communications tool and more towards asynchronous communications.
A lot of these interesting phone+social shifts have taken place in little pieces. Jaiku and Plazes are examples of services that attempted to couple tightly with the device to create a location and status aware experience. The iPhone has created a platform for dozens of similar applications to spring up on as well, but we still seem to be missing some part of the puzzle.
I asked some folks on twitter today (in the most unscientific way) if they are talking on the phone more or less today than they were 10 years ago. The response was an overwhelming “far less”. Mind you, asking a bunch of fellow Twitter addicts might not be the best sample, but I think it is indicative of a trend. The thing I am not sure about is exactly why we are moving away from voice, and if it is even an actual trend, or if we are just seeing the back end of a cycle.
Will Voice find its way in the social web?
The role of a voice conversation will probably have to change to find new growth markets. The very idea of why, and how, we use the phone will shift. Here are some ideas on what may happen.
The phone number: The phone number will not survive, at least not at its current level of importance. Contact Lists are becoming far more prevalent, and their usefulness is immediatly apparent. If you have ever used a Skype phone (hardware version of skype), you will know what I am talking about. When you pick up the handset you see your contact list right there. You know who is Available, who is around but Idle, and who has marked themselves as being away.
The real time conversation: I am not convinced that the phone, and voice in general, will exist only in a world of real time conversation. The snippet, or a less formal version of what we call Voicemail, could play a more significant role in a social future.
The Handset: Most people I know are now perfectly comfortable talking in to their computers to make a call. We are also increasingly using cellphone that feel and act more like computers than they do a traditional handset. As the tools and hardware get better, I think we will see the passing of the handset as the default tool for voice communication. In car communication tools, Bluetooth headsets that are self contained and new Netbooks will all be important factors.
Presence: We are updating our Facebook status, our Instant Messenger status, we are twittering. Why can’t all these activities inform our phone about what is important to us right now. Whether it is a a voicemail message that reads out my current Twitter status, or one that automatically deny’s certain callers based on what I am doing, there are all sorts of new possibilities that exist in creating mashups of new social tools and legacy systems.
A lot of people smarter than I have been thinking about voice communication for a long time, but I think it is time to start thinking about the changes in terms of sociality, not in terms of technology. VOIP has arrived and it no longer matters, what matters is finding ways to make voice communication more useful and relevant to an everyday life that is increasingly adopting text based communication.
Hot on the heels of our several posts on the article about Cisco in Fast Company, I just ran across this video from a presentation and Q&A he carried out at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
My emphasis below … I am reminded of Euan Semple’s classic post about implementing social computing (The 100% guaranteed easiest way to do Enterprise 2.0?), and I don’t doubt that one of, if not the, the hardest part is senior managers and executives getting used to the idea of less or different control.
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Cisco is undoubtedly a lab for E2.0, and Chambers is definitely in the pilot’s seat. His point about collaboration revolves around productivity and speed.
My attention was drawn by a couple of things he said, such as the new ability of the company to pursue 26 top priority projects at the same time instead of just one or two last year; or the fact that Chambers meets more customers now but less often face-to-face and more often virtually, less often one-on-one and more often as a group; or the fact that he had to get rid of 20% of his staff composed of control freaks who didn’t get it.
Chambers believes that communities are the very core of E2.0, and he admits that he had a hard time getting used to it.
-[ Snip ... ]
Based on Cisco’s own experience in the past several years, organizations will completely restructure around these new capabilities. Indeed, he offers up his company as a paradigm of this vision. Once a hierarchical, command and control-based organization, Cisco is now much flatter, a company running “off of social networking groups.” Councils with cross-functional responsibilities suggest and take on many more projects (from emerging markets, to video, and smart grid boards); from one to two major ventures per year, to this year’s 26 launches.
The next generation company is “built around the visual.” Cisco employees do non-stop teleconferencing with collaborators around the world. The company hosts 2500 such virtual meetings per week. It also employs Webex, Wikis and blogging to move work along.
With this kind of communication and carefully managed process to match, “operations can be turned on a head,” says Chambers. It’s the recipe for market-dominating speed and scale. Chambers is “loading the pipeline” with projects that assume other companies will want what Cisco has and makes.
“If we’re right, we’re developing a huge wave of revenue opportunity.” Perhaps this is one reason why he’s “an optimist on global productivity, global economy and our ability to handle the challenges.”
January 5, 2009 at 10:00 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
This is another “it had to happen but the apocalypse must be near” moment. I learned about the Shorty Awards that honors the best producers of short (140 characters or less, on Twitter) content in 2008. There are many categories(e.g., sports, news, food, personal photography weird).Mari Smith, who writes the Why Facebook blog, was pushing her candidacy and urging her readers to vote for her. It is too late for the initial tally as the initial round of voting ended midnight December 31. Had I known I would have voted for our own Paula Thornton.
However, as TechCrunch writes the “five Tweeters with the most nominations in each category will take part in a final round between January 5th and 14th. An awards ceremony will be held in New York in late January, where the winners of the “most important categories” (the site doesn’t say what qualifies as important) will be able to deliver acceptance speeches in person or via video in 140 characters or less.”
How do they say this with a straight face? What is next? Perhaps the Oscars should adopt this principle to avoid overly long acceptance speeches, as our attention spans get shorter. At least they need to have a speech that can be summarized on Twitter
Dean Takahashi at Venture Beat shared with us a summary of a recent Deloitte survey on the state of media. The report concludes that, “We’re living in a media democracy, where no single form of media dominates the attention of Americans. It’s also an age where everyone contributes to the media, not just traditional media companies.” The last part is old news but I find the first part more interesting.
There has been discussion about whether blogging will continue in the age of Twitter. I have mentioned, as have others, that they have different functions and complement each other. Twitter may take away a few of the functions of blogs but there are many left that cannot be handled by Twitter.
There has been very few times where a new media actually completely replaces an old one. Each new advance in communication technology expands the possibilities for knowledge capture and distribution. In each case it took a while to understand the possibilities and the requirements to enable them. Take text or writing for example: the invention of the phonetic alphabet around 700 B.C. enabled a number of unforeseen and unintended capabilities.
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Deloitte’s organisational consulting has for some time now been involved in employee engagement and organisational change, and so its practitioners in those areas will understand more of the emerging sociology of the networked workplace environment than the other major consulting firms. And of course, not to miss a beat, all the other major firms will all be out there now telling customers they have found a new ball to kick around, i,e, social computing. They will come up with logical responses wherever there seems to be a growing market. But beware of these firms’ response, in my opinion. If you want to know why, email me.
Is the general awareness of the effects of using computers, the Web and the easy sharing and consumption of information flows beginning to reach a critical mass ? Bill’s blog post would seem to suggest so.
And I’ll argue, as I have done for some time now, that the spread and penetration of social media use into organisations large and small will lead to some major changes in the practice of leadership and management (Will Enterprise 2.0 Drive Management Innovation?, FASTForward, January 10, 2008) and slowly but surely the impact will be (or should be) the increased democratisation of many organisations.
My favourite astrologer does not agree … but we all know horoscope forecasts are somewhat suspect, right ? But short-term, I can see the logic … in uncertain and ambiguous times, many people like the feeling of increased certainty offered by direction and control. Just ask Lou Gertner what was the hardest part of the IBM turnaround in the early 90’s .. he’ll tell you "upward delegation"
But indeed some form of democratisation reaching through a wide range of human activities, including work in an enterprise, seems inevitable. The only alternative, I suggest, is the eventual use of information technology to control almost everything knowledge workers do, reducing computing activities to completing forms and updating various reports. That does not seem too likely, but I suppose its true that you can’t predict the future.
Do you want your workplace to become more democratic than it is today ? How will your workplace engage you a year from now … two years from now … five years from now ?
I’ve used this quote from business strategist and futurist Stan Davis before, but in this context I am not ashamed to repeat it because there are some very long term shifts underway for all of us, as the Deloitte study is beginning to recognize. The media we use to work and interact with others is fundamentally different than it was at the end of the do com boom, and it ain’t going away.
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While there wasn’t something called social media or social computing back then, here’s Stan Davis on organizing in the future, from the 1987 book Future Perfect:
"Electronic information systems enable parts of the whole organization to communicate directly with each other, where the hierarchy wouldn’t otherwise permit it.
What the hierarchy proscribes, the network facilitates: each part in simultaneous contact with all other parts and with the company as a whole. The organization can be centralized and decentralized simultaneously: the decentralizing mechanism in the structure, and the coordinating mechanism in the systems.
Networks will not replace or supplement hierarchies; rather the two will be encompassed within a broader conception that embraces both. We are still a long way from figuring out the appropriate and encompassing organization models for the economy we are now in."
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Here’s Stan catching up to the Web 2.0 world ("catching up" isn’t quite the right term … outlining what he think with respect to the most recent development so n the Web is probably better
Decision-making over the past quarter-century has continually moved from the center to periphery, down hierarchies to where decisions are carried out. Current technologies, especially of the Web 2.0 world, have moved that decision-making even further, overwhelmingly beyond firms’ boundaries and into the physical and mental space of the customer.
The differences between the two worlds are striking.
Whereas information is still hoarded and protected in companies, it is freely shared and reused in the connected Web 2.0 world. Hierarchy and command still rule the day in most organizations, while individuals are self-organizing, loose and flat.
Other shifts are from command & control to adapt & evolve, from provider-generated to consumer-generated content, from vertical to horizontal organization, and from an ‘audience-’ to a ‘community-’ approach to customers.
Join us for the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 Oct 3-6, Anaheim CA
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RECENT EVENT
Christian Finn Keynotes 2011 Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston
Microsoft's Director of SharePoint Product Management Christian Finn, an Enterprise 2.0 keynote speaker, talks about SharePoint, the future of enterprise collaboration and the value of community.
To read more, visit, CMS Wire
Or view the video of the keynote below:
SharePoint 2010 SocialFest
A group of seven startups recently joined us at SharePoint 2010 SocialFest, an event hosted by the Emerging Business Team at the Microsoft Silicon Valley Campus.
The format: a week-long session focused on extending the SharePoint platform using their unique and innovative applications in the emerging social business space. In addition to intensive development time, the teams heard from various developer experts, SharePoint engineering, SharePoint product management and a panel of nventure investors.
The FASTforward blog periodically hosts webcasts - to hear a recent conversation with Denise Warren, general manager of NYTimes.com, and Alan Webber, author of "Rules of Thumb" and co-founder of Fast Company. The topic: how today's newspaper and magazine publishing companies are innovating to stay relevant (and profitable) click here.For the latest interview with Marty St.George, the CMO at jetBlue, click here
FASTforward 09: Video Interviews
Be sure not to miss our interview series with several dozen attendees of FASTforward'09, including all the contributors to this blog, as well as Clay Shirky, Charlene Li, and many other notable thinkers and doers. The interviews are tagged and can be accessed by topic.
Check out the first of a series of guides to the 2.0 world from the contributors of the FASTforward Blog. This and future FASTforward Blog guides aim to deepen understanding about topics we think critical to the future of the enterprise and how people and organizations communicate, collaborate, innovate, and more.
In this guide, Robert Paterson weaves together the many posts that have been written on the FASTforward blog about Twitter, the groundbreaking application that has attracted millions of users and is changing the way they provide, gather, and share information and insights.
This site is a companion blog to the FASTforward conference and summit series and is sponsored by FAST, A Microsoft Subsidiary. The blog, like the conference series, aims to drive and deepen conversation about how today’s companies can use technology to place users in control of information, and is home to ongoing discussion about the user revolution and Enterprise 2.0 opportunities and challenges. More info here...
The phone number: The phone number will not survive, at least not at its current level of importance. Contact Lists are becoming far more prevalent, and their usefulness is immediatly apparent. If you have ever used a Skype phone (hardware version of skype), you will know what I am talking about. When you pick up the handset you see your contact list right there. You know who is Available, who is around but Idle, and who has marked themselves as being away.
