Author Archive
by Jevon MacDonald
September 2, 2008 at 9:22 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Google is announcing a new enterprise product today. Google Video for Business. The product is available to Google Apps premier subscribers, which costs about $50/user/year. Each Google Apps Premier Edition domain gets 3GB of Video storage per user account, with a file limit of 300 MB per video.
The tool is essentially YouTube for your organization. You can upload videos, comment on them, add bookmarks and share the videos around.
This is interesting for a lot of obvious reasons. Video in the enterprise is relatively untested, and there are a lot of problems with it. Not the least of which is search quality and general information findability. Video is a great place to send information to die.
That said, video can bring life to existing information and it is extremely effective in relaying news. Video also demands a certain level of attention once the person is watching.
I am not convinced that there are a lot of use cases for video are beyond announcements and How-To’s.
What do you think, what would you use video for inside your organization?
by Jevon MacDonald
September 1, 2008 at 1:01 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
When I was 12 or 13 years old, I was taught one of the most valuable lessons I have learned yet. Someone who I would call a mentor told me that his secret to life was that he was just really good at screwing up. He married someone who understood that and he was sure to always learn from each failure.
This advice has served me well over the years. I married someone who is the first to tell me when I do something stupid, and she’s the first to move on from it. I have business partners who are often even more forgiving, and friends who are not only forgiving, but who I think take a perverse pleasure in each other’s mistakes. I guess you have to be able to see the humor in things!
In working with a potential customer a few weeks ago, we had come to that bad place in social computing. He was fixated on mitigating risk, I was fixated on keeping the project in a box that he could sell in to his company, and we were both generally just losing faith.
J.P. recently wrote “Now we come to Enterprise 2.0, a term that is many things to many people. There was a time when I thought I knew what it was, a time long since past.“. I found my self screaming “preach it!” from the pews. I have stopped trying to define Enterprise 2.0, and so have most people who have had to wade through board meetings, pitches and proposals to try to get social media initiatives underway inside the enterprise.
Like JP, I am not really sure what Enterprise 2.0 is, but if someone were to ask me, I would say that one of the secrets of Enterprise 2.0 is in being really good at failure.
The ability to fail isn’t exactly a widely acclaimed business strategy. CEOs do not get bonuses for good failures, and the quality of a failure is rarely measured in an organization, as opposed to successes which are regularly measured and then paraded around.
Google is a good example of a company that seems to recognize failure as an acceptable part of business. In the slew of projects and products that Google regularly launches, they regularly allow products to fail in the market. The incredible thing is that Google has taken a liability (public failure) and they have turned it in to an asset (the perception that Google is cutting edge, innovative and execution focused).
Identifying, chronicling and reacting to failed initiatives is a crucial competency of large organizations, but it is overlooked in place of an obsession with engineered success, highly managed systems, and governance-driven benchmarks.
A Failure Economy is one of the major strategic opportunities of the use of Enterprise 2.0 tools and strategies.
How does Enterprise 2.0 change the way we should perceive failures?
- Identify failure earlier. Your entire organization can monitor the project, surface key data points and offer analysis of the health of the project.
- Chronicle and catalog failure. Was this project attempted unsuccessfully before? What were the environmental factors that influence the failure? Was it an internal failure, or a market-driven result.
- Understand the innovator’s mindset. Who drove the project forward and what was their rationale? Their blog entries and wiki articles from the project will provide valuable insight.
- Identify successful components. What parts of the project were successful, even if the entire project was not successful?
Today Google is launching Google Chrome, an open source browser project, and a few months ago it was Google Knol. I won’t begin to catalog all of Google’s failed projects, but there have been many. In the past we would have judged a failure rate like Google’s as dismal and a commentary on the health of the organization, but instead we judge Google as innovative and capable.
How different could the public perception of your business be if you allowed the same level of innovation and risk?
Social software and strategies are the first steps towards getting good at screwing up. Until now there was far too much risk in allowing projects to fail in the marketplace. This was because there was no ability to identify the failure early enough, and there was also very little capability to have that failure inform future effort. We now have these capabilities, and it is time to revisit failure as a strategic capability rather than an organizational liability.
This is the sort of thing someone should write a book about.
by Jevon MacDonald
August 25, 2008 at 8:21 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
I am sad to say that I will be missing the Office 2.0 conference for the first time ever. I went and was completely inspired at the first one, and was a co-organizer last year.
There are a few things about Office 2.0 that put it above most other conferences. Here are my thoughts:
The Gadget
Obviously this is a big one. When I turned up for the first Office 2.0 conference, I didn’t even know we’d be getting a gadget at all. The whole place was buzzing. Last year it was great to get the iPhone. This year it looks even better. This year it is the HP 2133 Mini-Note, which looks incredible.
The thing about the device is that you are more or less forced to use it for the duration of the conference. It is the best way to get the schedule, leave messages for other people, etc. Being immersed in the use of the device forces you to wake up to the possibilities that portable computing devices put in front of us. It also makes you think about the sociality of mobile computing.
Bang for your buck
This partially relates to getting the gadget as well (it usually makes up 3/4 or more of the cost of your registration), but since Office 2.0 is not run as a money maker, you get treated well, and I mean really well, instead of being seen as an opportunity for profit.
The lunches are a big tastier, the coffee is decent (and the Tea at the St Regis is incredible), and in general you feel like the conference is being put on for you, not someone else.
Content
Sure, there is some of the usual vendor content at Office 2.0, but there is one key difference. Ismael puts quality first, and he never allows a panel or keynote to go ahead unless he sees the value to the community. Office 2.0 is one of the only conference that can change the way you think about collaboration, productivity and web 2.0
People
Every year Office 2.0 is packed with really cool and brilliant people. The big difference though is there is never the “cooler than thou” vibe you might get other places. People are constantly organizing dinners, drinks and parties and the only way you won’t get an invite is if you don’t talk to anyone.
Wow. It is hard to believe I won’t be there. I think I should go check for flights and cancel my meetings!
by Jevon MacDonald
July 25, 2008 at 10:44 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Isn’t the whole premise a little off?
I have seen a dozen or so Digg-like decision making systems inside of organizations right now and every time I look at them I get a heavy feeling in my stomach. I see hundred, and thousands of individuals, thousands of smart people all reduced to one cumulative number mashed on to the side of the screen.
You, me, everyone. Just a number.
Lumping a mass of people in to an aggregate is not what Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 is about. I believe more than ever that the excitement of the gospel of the Wisdom of Crowds was a mistake in judgment by many of us.
I also know why it has been successful in being piloted inside of organizations.
The idea of compiling all of the thoughts, emotions and aspirations of your workforce or customers in to one simple, easy to digest number is something that appeals to people who don’t want to deal with the messy thing we call humanity.
This is about the Wisdom of Me. The Wisdom of You. The Wisdom of Us.
I’m sorry, but this whole thing about being social is really messy. Messy like children, messy like love, messy like business. Messy like life.
Put on your rubber boots and an old pair of jeans. You are going to have to learn some names, you’ll make some mistakes and I can promise that it will hurt at times, but you can do this. It has already gotten started.
by Jevon MacDonald
July 11, 2008 at 1:12 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Susan and I have been talking a lot lately about how much confusion there is around what parts of 2.0 play a role in a business, and where. The mixing and mingling of PR vs Enterprise Social Media, vs collaboration vs enterprise 2.0 tends to get mixed up quickly as people jockey for contracts and to establish themselves in the space.
Customers are left pretty confused, being sold a hammer to tighten a bolt and a lawnmower to take in their crop of wheat.
This diagram is intended to help us break apart each component and see it in the right context. Where does Social Media overlap with Enterprise 2.0? How about collaboration?
By no means are we saying that this is complete, it is just a start. We need your help. Head over to Susan’s blog to find out how you can contribute.
Over the next few weeks I will be looking at each part of the 2.0 diagram, and what it means for the enterprise.
by Jevon MacDonald
June 10, 2008 at 7:16 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
I am just about to get on a plane to go to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston.
I will be moderating a panel this year called “Social Computing Platforms: Three Alternatives for the Enterprise”
Social computing platforms integrate enterprise 2.0 capabilities into a single platform (blogs, wikis, RSS, etc.) Three basic choices are available to the SMB and large enterprise. The first is to choose an established large enterprise application vendor’s solution (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle); the second is to choose a startup’s offering (Jive/Clearspace, Thoughtfarmer) and the third is to “roll your own” or build a customized application that provides all the functionality you’re looking for based on components available from the open source community.
I would like to hear from you first. What size of company should go with what type of solution? Is there a 1-size fits all answer?
by Jevon MacDonald
May 15, 2008 at 11:37 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Thomas Vander Wal and I flew in to Las Vegas on Tuesday to do an afternoon workshop on Enterprise 2.0. It was a lot of fun to work with Thomas, who I think is possibly the top thinker in building and designing social tools. It was an honor to work with him. We tried to offer something for everyone, covering everything from tool design to case studies and strategy examples.
Today is the third day of the conference and the theme of the day is Enterprise 2.0. The session I am looking forward to the most is Mat Fogarty talking about EA’s use of Xpree to build a prediction market.
This conference is not a typical Enterprise 2.0 conference. It isn’t crawling with vendors, it isn’t full of analysts and consultants. Far and away, the vast majority of people here are customers. Everything from farming cooperatives to telecoms, people seem to be here to learn what the real benefits for their organization might be. That is a refreshing change that I am thankful for.
The agenda can be found here.
by Jevon MacDonald
April 23, 2008 at 10:24 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
Onaswarm.com got a nice review form Mashable today that says it just might be the service to give FriendFeed a run for its money.
I played around with Onaswarm for the first time in a few months last night and there have been a lot of improvements. It is the only lifestreaming service that addresses many of the concerns I have expressed.
For those of you who aren’t sure what Lifestreaming or NewsFeeds are, they are reverse chronological updates about an individual’s activities. It is a format that was largely brought in to prominence by Facebook.
Tools like Onaswarm give us an idea of how this information flow format might be useful inside the enterprise. As we introduce more and more social, collaborative and intelligence tools, keeping track of activity becomes a practical impossibility, and the dashboard format becomes unwieldy and unreliable.
Onaswarm lets you break down the lifestreams of those you are following in to groups, and it lets larger groups form in to “swarms”. These kind of natural and ad-hoc groupings offer a huge advantage over more rigid and established models.
Could Lifestreams and News Feeds be the next generation of the enterprise dashboard?
by Jevon MacDonald
April 22, 2008 at 8:59 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Social Media
Business Intelligence, known as BI, is an area of enterprise software and strategy focused on the collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of business information. This can be just-in-time data from business operations, market data, trends or any other business related information.
The prominence of BI has been rising in recent years, primarily due to the fact that more business data than ever is now available and we finally have reasonably priced systems for collecting and presenting that data.
The presentation of BI data is typically in the form of a Dashboard interface. Dashboards have been available in an enterprise setting since the late 90’s. While the polish of these offerings has improved, and there has been significant (in breadth) but slow movement toward open standards for dashboard elements (known as Widgets), there has been very little progress in improving the overall user experience and business value of the tool itself. Instead, the improvement in data, both in volume and quality, has driven most of the progress so far.
Open source projects such as Pentaho and JBoss portals are raising the status quo for the quality of the underlying infrastructure while companies like Mendix are driving the most significant interface and process-enhancing progress.
Smart, but could it drive you to irrelevance?
The opportunities made available by higher quality and highly relevant data can not be understated. Business Intelligence tools represent some of the most exciting possibilities in recent years, but it also has the potential to be the single biggest missed opportunity in the enterprise yet.
Do you remember the smartest kid in your school? (it may have been you — kudos!) There is always a sort of tragedy about just how smart a kid can be, as unless they posses the requisite social skills their smarts may never take them as far as a Ph.D and no further. More importantly, no matter how smart a person is, we all need to have a personal dream and vision, without those we lumber in obscurity.
The same is true for your company. In getting too smart about your business, there is a risk in alienating yourself from your staff, your partners and ultimately, your customers if you do not provide them with the ability to benefit from this new level of business data.
The Intelligence Funnel
Business Intelligence tools must be viewed as part of a stack strategy to not only improve business data, but to radically change how that data can be acted on. There are three core components of this strategy
Raw Business Intelligence
This is raw, real-time data from your operations. On-Time performance, costs, spend, etc. These are all critical data-points for monitoring the performance of your organization. The real-time nature of this data also means that you can react quickly to any trends or shifts that you observe.
Social Intelligence
Social Intelligence is your ability to understand what your customers, employees and partners perceive regarding your organization, product and strategy. The inability to listen closely is the achilles heel of the modern organization. So few resources are focused on listening and synthesizing information that the skill is almost non-existent.
Social Collaboration
This is the final, foundational, layer of your Intelligence Funnel. The volume of information you will be dealing with will mean it is a practical impossibility for a finite number of people to filter, manage and synthesize all of the available sources.
Your Intelligence Funnel will federate this component out as far in to your business network as possible. Can your restaurant managers do a better job of monitoring and troubleshooting your supply chain than your corporate staff can? Can your branch office staff provide more significant and timely feedback on the effectiveness of a new marketing campaign than a call center worker can? Will the clerk at your car rental shop have a better and more timely understanding of customer requests than your annual survey?
The list goes on, but the point is that the volume of data will continue to increase at an incredible rate and if you do not have a scalable plan in place to leverage that data than it will be both a wasted asset and eventually a liability and a cost driver.
New Business Processes
The end result of the Business Intelligence Funnel is the ability to identify, create and implement new business processes which are cheaper and better timed than what you are able to create and deploy now using a centralized model.
by Jevon MacDonald
March 26, 2008 at 9:06 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
One of the things I keep hearing from customers (buyers of enterprise software) here at the Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit is that as they start to make the leap and begin purchasing social platforms and tools from vendors, they are getting left out in the cold when it comes to roll out. Often broken deployments, poor documentation, ever changing interfaces with lagging documentation, half-baked features, the list went on.
These conversations are just reinforcing something for me that I have believed for a long time: When you sell collaboration tools, you are taking on a level of responsibility that software vendors have not assumed in the past.
One of the big offenders appears to be IBM. The chief complaint being that their new platforms such as Quickr are so poorly documented and there is so little use case and other guidance that IT departments that are installing it aren’t able to properly train users. There were also several mentions of incomplete and downright broken features being put in to the software at critical social junctions. The response from IBM, according to was that those particular features were still in testing. You hear this less about Sharepoint, but the reliance on integrators would explain most of that. I have also heard the same thing about smaller vendors, but the level of satisfaction seems to be higher.
I did not experience this first hand — I am not a customer and have only demoed these tools — so take it with a grain of salt — this is all anecdotal of course, but it is making a clear point: Vendors need to understand the implications of social software and guide their clients in both achieving the maximum impact from social tools but they must also help mitigate the initial pain.
This is a new depth of the customer-vendor relationship, but for the short-term at least, it is going to be a prerequisite for successful deployments.
What we have right now are traditional vendors, IBM, Novell, Microsoft and BEA in particular, who understand that Social Software can open up a huge new market for them, but they are not at all ready yet themselves to properly address the market needs. They are showing a level of immaturity and irresponsibility that is unsettling. Instead of looking to outside thinkers and experienced practitioners for guidance, they are putting their customers at a huge risks post-deployment while promising too much up front.
Organizations with an internal locus of self control will gravitate toward smaller vendors and vendors who provide toolkits that the organization can customize and deploy in their own way. Longer term, customer are going to start buying social tools that fit specific needs in their value chain and workflow, and we are finally starting to see vendors popping up to provide these tools.
Much of this runs counter to my recent position that the incumbents are going to sweep up the majority of the new market and the space within the existing markets. I still think that is true, but I think the long term outlook is much fuzzier.
by Jevon MacDonald
March 26, 2008 at 11:13 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
I am here at the Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit. I will be posting about the sessions that I am in.
If you were here, what questions would you have for Gartner and what questions would you have for Gartner customers?
by Jevon MacDonald
February 23, 2008 at 11:15 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
This is my favorite sign from FASTForward. I think it says a lot about the company and the idea that creating new things and being a step ahead is more important than protecting old ideas.
I found it on a blog but now I can’t remember which blog it was. (I didn’t have a camera to take a picture myself at the conference). If you took this, let me know and I will link through to you.
by Jevon MacDonald
February 20, 2008 at 8:53 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
One of the biggest changes I have seen in the discussion at FASTForward from last year to this year has been in the framing of the conversation that went on at the conference.
FAST and other search companies have some of the best assets available to them to create predictive software tools and platform that can create new experiences for the user.
The question that I am left banging around inside my head is If we didn’t have search, how else would we expect the world to wade through all the information on the web.
Social filters, predictive interfaces and context-sensitive information delivery become much more important, but the principals behind them remain very similar to search. I haven’t been able to figure out what FAST and other search companies are doing in this space, but it seems like a squandered asset if they aren’t doing anything about it.
How about you? What can you imagine as the most compelling way to take the huge data sets that a company like FAST would have, and what creative ways could they be exposed to the user?
Me? I would like to see a page that is auto-built using my emails (the tool would access my email) that compiles all relevant enterprise content based on the text of my emails and and it would create a page for each email thread with the proper links. I could then easily share that content (if it is allowed) with the people in the email thread.
by Jevon MacDonald
February 11, 2008 at 10:45 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
I have my own ideas, but I want to hear from you. Who do you think the leaders of Enterprise 2.0 really are? Who are the up and coming stars and who are the blowhards? Who are the hidden gems and who do you think has it all wrong? Who is out there doing the hard work and not getting any credit?
Post your links in the comments. I will start with that list as I begin a new series of posts on the Who’s Who of Enterprise Social Computing.
by Jevon MacDonald
January 30, 2008 at 12:04 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
This is become more and more of an obvious trend to look out for: A twitter clone in the Enterprise. Some early tools are now sprouting up to enable cheap low-risk deployments of the necessary tools.
As I work on a more detailed post on the topic, I thought I would jot down some quick notes as to why I think this is a positive trend, but also why it will have some pitfalls.
Positive Results
- Forces reduction of hierarchy enforcing rules
- I say this because the more you constrain and layer access controls on “tweets” the less value they have overall, but more significantly, it directly reduces the benefit to the creator
- Personal Brand development - highly personal platform
- Crises discovery and management capability
- Increased awareness of ongoing work
- Interactions between individuals can strengthen their social-network ties to further inform other tools (like search, group forming, etc)
- Potential to outperform other tools in the rate of adoption (low barrier to start using the tool)
Potential Issues
- Immediate business value may not be apparent depending on the organization
- Low search value (individual entries to not usually contain full content on any specific topic)
- Must be device agnostic. Individuals who do almost all their email on a blackberry will need an appropriate version of an Enterprise twitter
I am just starting to form these thoughts. What do you think? Will Twitter be a disaster in the Enterprise, or will it be a hit?
by Jevon MacDonald
January 17, 2008 at 12:08 pm · Filed under
Books, Enterprise 2.0
My copy of WikiPatterns arrived while I was away for the holidays, so it was a bit of a second Christmas when I arrived back to find that there was a package waiting for me. I couldn’t, as much as I tried, remember ordering anything, so I tore the envelope open and there it was: WikiPatterns (Author’s Site)
Those who know me know that I am not a huge wiki proponent. I don’t talk about them very much and I probably don’t give them as much respect as they deserve. They are one of the few Enterprise Social Computing tools to have reall caught on and I admit: I have seen a lot of success inside companies who use them.
So it was in that state of mind that I jumped in and started reading WikiPatterns. If it was going to capture my attention it had to be more than a book about Wikis, it had to take a much broader view of collaboration and social software.
Wikipatterns starts off in the first chapter by recounting one of the stories behind the genesis of the Toyota Manufacturing Process set in 1950, well before there were wikis. Stewart makes a few key points that made me think this book was about more than just wikis
Instead of giving people a job, and trying to control how they work, it’s better to let go: give them the job, and let them figure out the best way to do it. . . The outcome is what matters, not the method. Not only is the end result better, but it’s not just a flash in the pan. It’s something sustainable. An isn’t that what every organization wants?
The book then dives right in and talks about the elephant in the room: Wikipedia. In the section called “The Wikipedia Factor” Stewart explains the differences between Wikipedia and your own internal company wiki.
Wikipatterns covers almost every component of Enterprise 2.0, from examining the effects on Knowledge Management, fantastic case studies to a guide to running your own pilot programs.
Without rehashing the entire book, I have to say that this one surprised me. This is your first Playbook that will help you break through the frustrations of trying to learn “what do I do next?” when you are eager to bring Enterprise 2.0 tools and strategies to your company.
I’ll be handing out copies to friends and clients. (PS: The links to the Amazon.com wikipatterns page contain my affiliate link. I am doing this as an experiment as I have never done an affiliate link before. Please feel free to just navigate to wikipatterns.com)
by Jevon MacDonald
January 14, 2008 at 1:19 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
FastForward is looking pretty interesting this year. With the news about Microsoft’s interest in Fast, and some great new product improvements over the last year, I am willing to be that it is going to be sold out and then some.
Are you going to make it to Orlando? Almost the entire FastForward blog cabal is going to be there, including the freshly added Jon Husband.
I made it to FastForward 07 as well and was surprised how how good the content was. While there were a lot of the normal customer focused sessions about implementing Fast and similar topics, there were also a lot of more more high level sessions. Most notably was the bloggers roundtable last year which was headed up by Andrew McAfee and got quite interesting (although I have to admit, I had trouble getting a word in edgewise!).
Are you going to be there? If so, leave a comment or drop me an email (jevonm at gmail . com), I’d love to meet as many people as possible.
by Jevon MacDonald
January 4, 2008 at 11:32 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
I made a short trip today to see an old client. He is now working in a different company, but he is seeing a lot of the same problems we first worked on over 6 years ago.
A few things struck me about the visit. In the time since we last worked together, a lot has changed in our worlds.
Craig was obviously not just smarter than he was 6 years ago, but after having been in the trenches (he deployed an Enterprise 2.0 solution to a huge organization in 2002, totally changing how it did business) for so long, he had a wisdom about the powerful nature of Enterprise Social Software. As he spoke about the business need for social software at his new employer, where he is a Vice President, he consistently nailed every point on the value and the possibilities that this opportunity would bring.
The interesting thing about Craig is that after we did this, he quit his job and became a front-line employee (managing a branch) in which he had to use the very software he deployed in order to do his job. (I am not prettying this up, he really did quit, and he really did choose to go to the front line)
I also realized that things have changed a lot for me as well. We are no longer talking about selling big, expensive, custom-built solutions, but instead we looked at a set of tools that can help the specific needs of this company, and I was no longer selling an idea in the way we had to before, we could now talk about successes and failures not as a hypothesis but instead as true stories we had lived. I also saw that this wasn’t a “sales call”, those don’t exist for us anymore, this felt like the beginning of an adventure, the end of which is largely unknown, and the destination will be the product of its participants.
I think if you asked Craig, he would say that he is a total amateur at this stuff. I would also bet that he would have no clue what Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0 or Social Software means by definition, those things have no relevance to him. Craig is one of the rare breeds of executives who sees these tools as part of a unique way to build real value for his business. He doesn’t need to flash around big ideas and fancy words, instead he’ll be busy building a team of managers and executives who are ready to dig in and learn the deep values behind the ideas. More importantly, he’ll be talking to his front-line staff and telling them the same things he tells his executive colleagues. He won’t hold back.
Enterprise 2.0 is not a career maker. I believe that in the next year you will see some real enterprise 2.0 rockstars who will be celebrated widely, they will promote themselves in a serious way and will reap the praise.
Craig, on the other hand, will be getting on with it. He’ll be transforming how things work and doing it in a sustainable way that will not be erode with time. It is this substance that will really matter in the end, where other projects may fall out of fashion, and a lot of expensive software and consultants will come and go, a real enteprise social software project will stand the test of time.
It is easy to forget that real success is not determined by the deployment, but by latent factors which many of the current Enterprise 2.0 tools do not measure (why is this?) such as the regularity of logins by individuals, the ratio of content creation vs content consumption, the amount of views of old content vs new content, the “explorability” of the platform based on how often and how deeply users navigate beyond their usual content and the ration of shared content vs private. (there are a lot more factors, but those are separate posts).
You can “deploy” to a million users, but it doesn’t matter if they don’t participate. If you don’t have the tools to constantly understand what the participation levels really are, then you can’t respond in a meaningful way if there are problems.
There are real success stories out there. Smart people doing wonderful things that change business and that change lives. I promise to follow along on this one and let you know how it goes.
by Jevon MacDonald
December 12, 2007 at 12:04 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
The FastForward conference is focused on The User Revolution as its theme this year, which is perfectly timed for a debate that recently exploded in the enterprise blogging world.
Robert Scoble started things off innocently enough, asking why Enterprise Software isn’t sexier. It sparked a pretty significant reaction from a lot of my fellow Enterprise Irregulars.
The first and probably most abrupt response came from Michael Krigsman on the IT Project Failures blog who bordered on being apologetic for the current state of some enterprise software.
A few themes, or points of view, emerged from the conversations that followed:
- Enterprise Software shouldn’t be user friendly, because it has too much real work to do
- Enterprise Software should continue to act as it does, but should have a nicer layer on top of it
- End Users don’t know what they need
- Large IT lifecycles are so long that User Interfaces are always out of date
Some parallel conversations also got started, with some taking a much longer term look at enterprise software and speculating that it will shift from focusing on the hierarchy of the organization and will instead switch to focusing on giving the power to the individual.
I did chime in with my own thoughts on the issue, what do you think? Does Enterprise Software need to be more social, better looking or easy to use?
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by Jevon MacDonald
November 29, 2007 at 8:33 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
In 1534 a group of men, some disillusioned soldiers, some students, all a mishmash of Spaniards, Portuguese and French gathered outside paris to form an order. The Company of Jesus was a commitment to each-other and to their cause.
to “enter upon hospital and missionary work in Jerusalem, or to go without questioning wherever the pope might direct”
You don’t have to be Christian, Catholic or even religious to have some respect for that kind of commitment. A vow of poverty and a future of unknowns. These men were a special type of person, who would stay committed to their cause through untold hardship. Upon forming, the Jesuit Priests split up and set out to complete the tasks given to each member by the pope. There are two parts of the story about this order that are relevant to the introduction of social computing in to an organization today. The first is the story of the constitution of the order.
The founder of the order, Ignatius of Loyola, was tasked with creating a constitution and set of rules for the brotherhood. I am sure that having to live within the Catholic Church, easily the largest enterprise of the day, did not make this easy. His approach, and one we should replicate, was methodical and took place over a period of six years. Ignatius of Loyola did not draw up arbitrary rules as I can only imagine would have been common in the church, instead he introduced rules or customs and tested them out, getting rid of ones that didn’t work and keeping the ones which helped move the order forward. Instead of pretending he had the answers, which as leader would have been typical, he chose to do what was sensible.
The second lesson, or perhaps warning, is how hard the work of the Jesuit Priest was at this time. The thankless journey in to unknown populations to spread a gospel that most people didn’t understand or particularly want. This is the role of the Enterprise 2.0 Evangelist in a large organization today. Behind you, you have the enterprise, playing the role of the church, and in front you have a hostile population.What can the Priests and Priestesses of Enterprise 2.0 do to be successful? How can a mid-level employee bring social computing in to their organization? Is it hopeless? Are the Jesuit Priests of Enterprise 2.0 bound to a life of pain and rejection?
Take a page from the Jesuits. You have to go in to unknown cultures, unknown places with unknown risks and you have to put it all on the line. You must live the faith in the most stubborn way possible and only then will your message be seen and heard. Above all else, the Jesuits aimed to live their faith and be examples rather than simply act as preachers. The impact of this was profound.
Few societies have entrenched themselves so successfully across the globe as the Jesuits, they have been resilient to change and catastrophe over the years and they have, arguably, been successful in achieving many of their original goals. Leave your views of religious orders at the door, I know I had to, and take a look at the story of a small group of revolutionaries who created one of the most distributed, organic and innovative organizations that the world has ever seen.
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