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Enhancing Product Development with Enterprise 2.0

by Bill Ives

July 6, 2010 at 3:05 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

As enterprise 2.0 matures, its uses are getting more focused. I have been hearing more about it use in product development. Here is a timely Forrester report on the topic, Use Social Computing To Build Diﬀerentiated Product Development Processes by Roy C. Wildeman. As the summary states, “in recent years, leading product development organizations have proven the value of greater cross- functional collaboration to harness contributions from across the business and bring great products to market. With the rise in Social Computing among consumers and enterprises alike, development teams are further seeking to transform how they collaborate both internally and externally in key processes like ideation, requirements management, detailed development, and aftermarket support.”

It makes the claim that “succeed in the future, business process professionals must expand their thinking beyond traditional product development solutions and start experimenting with new social technologies.” I certainly agree. As another Forrester report (The HERO Index: Finding Empowered Employees by Ted Schadler and Josh Bernoff) notes, the more extensive and creative uses of social computing within the enterprise have often come from marketing. To be really competitive, companies need to embed social media and enterprise 2.0 throughout the organization and certainly in the product development area.

Forrester found three main opportunities exist for development teams to further innovate with enterprise 2.0. Note that Forrester uses the term social computing technologies and I am converting this to enterprise 2.0 to go beyond technology. The first one is to enable teams to better collaborate across distance or silos. The second is to bring in outside communities for product ideas, answers, and feedback. The third is integrate new services through social computing into traditional product offerings.

These all make sense. The second (aka crowdsourcing) as certainly got a big play in the press. I have a seen a number of R&D teams move from traditional reporting through email and attachments to blogs and wikis with great productivity increases. One satellite radio firm had its first on-time and on-budget development effort when it switched to a social computing platform for project reporting. One of the reasons attributed to this success was the increased transparency and its effect on individual and team attention to quality. The MIT Sloan CIO found that using blogs for project reporting greatly increased his efficiency in program monitoring and team mentoring. The Forrester report has a great chart on how social networking expands knowledge capacity beyond the usual “Go-to” resources for project development teams that makes explicit some of the possibilities for improvement.

The report also points out some of the potential obstacles to achieving success in these three areas including concerns over intellectual property and security, as well as the potential chaos from too much unstructured information and the need for clear governance. It also suggests some useful ways to address these issues. The report concludes with a set of recommendations for taking advantage of the opportunities within social computing.

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Doug HaddenJuly 6th, 2010 at 9:34 am

There seems to be a tendency to focus on what Enterprise 2.0 can do for product development through customer engagement. Don’t get me wrong: I fully agree with it. (And, one tends to get leading-edge and innovative ideas from customers who engage in Enterprise 2.0 with companies rather than traditional enhancement request processes and user groups.)

The hidden story is how companies are able to use Enterprise 2.0 for internal collaboration in product development. There really has been two major trends in software development: flexbility vs. traditional tools and global development.

Many small and medium sized ISVs cannot afford the high cost associated with requirements management tools. Many of these tools are built based on specific paradigms in software development. ISVs are able to adapt social networking technology to conform to their processes. Requirements, roadmaps, bug tracking, status reporting, market research etc are all possible using these tools. Engaging customer-facing folks with developers to answer questions is easily managed.

Many ISVs now develop globally. It can be a 24/7 development environment with offices and outsourcers around the world. Enterprise 2.0 tools are ideal for publishing and finding knowledge in the product development cycle. Participants can be anywhere with an Internet connection (as I am right now). It can break the mess of e-mail and IM communications where people need to hunt for needed data.

The use of Enterprise 2.0 tools for internal product development helps companies to understand how collaboration works – how to organize informaiton – how to encourage participation. Putting them on track for customer engagement.

Ellen FeahenyJuly 6th, 2010 at 11:47 am

Yes yes yes! As usual, on perfect target!

Enterprise 2.0 without product development to me simply lacks the needs business value.

I wrote a blog with a similar theme a last week… sorta different angle, but similar.

http://www.appfusions.com/display/Dashboard/2010/07/03/CrowdSourcing+into+real+product+-+phase+II