So I have been really bad about writing on the FastForward blog. While I’m as short on good excuses as posts, I have been doing some interesting things in this space that I think may be particularly valuable to this community. Some of the work has revolved around the openmethodology.org (MIKE2.0) and open-sustainability.org (FISDEV) initiatives that I mentioned in past articles.

I have also been working on omCollab, which is a platform that can be used for enterprise collaboration. The capabilities available in omCollab are driven for the business requirements to support BearingPoint’s IM Solution Suite initiative. omCollab is free and open source, so anyone can use it. We’re starting to get a nice development community going with key participants from the US, Europe and China. Feel free to use it and let us know what you think.

Part of the reason we made omCollab open source is to advance to goal of building an integrated content repository, where enterprises mashup to open content on the web and use it drive their strategy, design practices and community viewpoint of the best assets on the public web. The goal is to develop a collaborative, community-based standard. For the Enterprise Architects in the crowd, the closest approach from a content perspective is probably TOGAF although as far as I know no one has built an open and collaborative methodology or architecture framework in this fashion before. I believe the idea that had even greater relevance around sustainable development – which is why I started open-sustainability.org.

Although we’ve certainly had some good success around using the content from MIKE2.0, its has been tougher to  build a collaborative community around the approach.  Do you think it can work?  Anything we should do differently?

Some industries are a more natural fit for the techniques and technologies of Enterprise 2.0 than others. In this post, I’ll focus on two industries that have a lot to gain – Retail Banking and Health Care. These industries would also face significant questions around use of these techniques related to information security, stability and the degree of open communications that should be applied.

Decision Criteria

The simple model below associates Enterprise 2.0 benefits to the nature of a company. The greater the number of “highs”, the greater the benefit. Lots of organizations score well on this model, but some moved particularly early. Companies that benefited from the “long –tail” shaped web 1.0 and early web 2.0.

Initial Movers – Retailers and Media

The business models of many retailers and media companies were fundamentally changed by the internet. New entrants such as Amazon are now leaders in the industry. These industries shaped the web and were shaped by it. By the time web 2.0 came around, a number of new entrants were once again shaping the industry.

Next Enterprise 2.0 Movers?

There are two industries that seem to stand out – Retail Banking and Health Care. If we look at the model above, they actually score higher than many initial movers in categories such as technology complexity.

They have many similarities in their business:

• Both are consumer needs driven
• Both have high technology costs that are driven by years of legacy infrastructure complexity.
• Both have huge information management challenges as a result of this infrastructure
• Recent regulations have driven costs – even when the regulations were not significant – as they lacked agility

Take, for example, the retail side of a bank against the model above:

I’m a bit more liberal when applying the model to health care and I’ve referred to the patient as a customer and changed the wording from the perspective of a universal health care provider. This approach does assume business model changes to take advantage of the “long tail of health care” through better use of information and telemedicine.

Both industries face significant challenges

Both industries are under a lot of pressure. With banks my experience is that the complexity really wears them down and agility is very difficult to achieve. Banks make a lot of money, but new entrants with models like ING direct (reduce complexity) and prosper.com (collaborative community) may cause them trouble.

In terms of healthcare, an avalanche of costs is breaking current systems, whether in the countries like the US or in those applying more universal health care models. Providers need to better manage their information and establish a trusted relationship with the patient. Finding better ways to leverage collaborative technology can help in this area.

Implementation Path

I see both of these industries as having a lot to gain, with some challenges to overcome. Both have privacy concerns and the need for high levels of data security is fundamental. Release stability will be critical to customers. Key questions would also need to be asked about the pros/cons of customer collaboration.

The next few years should be very interesting for both.

Facebook and MySpace are the world’s most popular Social Networking sites, but are they the best model for bringing these web 2.0 concepts into the enterprise?

My view is trustedplaces is perhaps a better model to use as a reference. Its a collaborative site primarily for reviewing restaurants, clubs and pubs. The community effectively has jobs, and their social network forms as a by-product of the work that they do. It can still be a social network on its own, but you probably wouldn’t go there unless you were interested in the outcome.

Building the “bottom up approach”

Trusted Places does some particularly interesting things:

• Featuring contributors on the front page
• Providing “award points” for contributions
• You can interactively build your tastes
• Providing recommendations for new connections based on common interests
  

Combined with a great UI, I’m a big fan of what this team is doing.

Yes, Facebook has Applications

The lines are, of course, a bit greyer than I have painted them. Facebook applications can be used to find other people with common interests and help people build new connections. The Facebook platform can be used to build any functionality that TrustedPlaces has, and more. But since Facebook is so large and completely open in scope, I find it more difficult to relate to a work context. Facebook and MySpace may be more fun, but work, alas, is not always fun. And while there are plenty of focused product review sites, I’ve yet to see any that form social networks better than trustedplaces.

What public site do you think provides a good model for explaining Enterprise 2.0?

One of the areas I have been working for some time is the idea of Sustainability 2.0: Applying Web/Enterprise 2.0, Information Management and Open Source concepts to Sustainable Development. I’ve recently launched www.open-sustainability.org, the primary goal of which is to provide an open and collaborative approach that organizations can apply to introduce better Sustainability practices into their existing corporate delivery practices. The approach is called FISDEV (Framework for Integrated Sustainable Development) and it is an open standard to which anyone can contribute.

FISDEV is in the very early stages of development and at this stage most of the content merely provides a general framework for delivering an open source methodology, as opposed to specific content for Sustainability. Now that the “infrastructural content” is in place, there is a framework for building functional content in the context of an open method. This includes mashing up content from sites with lots of great content around Sustainability (especially on the environmental side) like Appropedia. The approach is summarized in this overview on Sustainability 2.0.

FISDEV takes a systems and architectural-based approach to Sustainable Development. The goal is to facilitate the creation of a new competency for Sustainable Development that can be implemented in an organization, starting with a strategic approach.

It references content from the MIKE2.0 Methodology under the Creative Commons, which used these same techniques and technologies to create a new competency for Information Development.

I’m optimistic that collaboration, transparency and an evidence-based approach can help shape this needed standard and that Enterprise 2.0 and Open Source can make it easier to fill a major need in helping companies improve their practices around Sustainable Development.

In 2004, two professors from INSEAD, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne published an article in the Harvard Business Review, introducing the concept of “Blue Ocean Strategy”. A number of articles soon followed and a book was published in 2005. This approach has quickly become one of today’s more influential works on business strategy and the book has published over a million copies.

Blue Ocean Strategy is about creating new markets through the introduction of new products. The reference to “Blue Ocean” comes from the authors’ use of a metaphor of markets as oceans. They claim that most organsiations compete in Red Oceans, with essentially the same products against a shared core customer base. In this model, companies focus all their time and energy competing with each another: products become commodities and victories are pyrrhic. With all this fighting, the marketplace is bloody – a Red Ocean.

Blue Oceans are about creating product offerings that are so fundamentally different, they create a new market. The competitor is innovation, not a similar company. As is shown in the book, companies that have created Blue Oceans have been the big winners in the 20^th century and the authors believe this trend with continue. Examples include Henry Ford with the automobile and Southwest Airlines with budget travel. Most case studies from the authors are not technology companies or even new companies.

The authors provide plenty of case studies that show that creating a Blue Ocean is not necessarily about technology. That said, I believe it is becoming increasingly difficult for an existing organisation to be innovative without good technology or at least simple technology – especially large companies. This is because their legacy systems are so complex and difficult to manage and their products so tied to this infrastructure that thinking beyond the current-state is extremely difficult.

Implementing systems based on Enterprise 2.0 principles of agility, collaboration and simplicity enables a much better way to innovate. It’s long journey for big company, but worth starting now. And sailing on the Blue Ocean gets a lot easier without a bunch of leaky boats.

I gave a recent presentation with Op Risk and Compliance Magazine on the application of Enterprise 2.0 concepts to manage risk. Most of the audience was non-technical and I doubt many attendees read TechCrunch, but the message around Enterprise 2.0 seemed to resonate quite well. The reason was quite clear – they wanted to better harness their “informal networks”.

The Business Problem

Prior to the meeting we conducted a survey with over a hundred individuals, from the CFO/CRO level to delivery leads.

• Most had made substantial investments in Information Management programs, including a better approach to governance, but still had huge challenges.

• Across virtually every type of risk, respondents relied on phone calls, e-mails and ad-hoc meetings as a major source of risk information.

• Most expected costs to keep going up from long-running Information Management programs; the strong services market for Information Management was causing turnover issues and knowledge was being lost.

• Despite the investment in governance programs, the defined standards and architectures weren’t always applied.

The results were largely as expected but it did help frame a discussion around Enterprise 2.0.

The Relevance of Enterprise 2.0

Most of these financial services organisations thought they were getting a better handle on their information assets and that their governance programs were helping. Feedback, however, stressed the relevance of the “informal network” in solving problems – the emails, hallway discussions and phone calls that place on a daily basis or in a crisis. What the session covered was that both formal Information Management frameworks and informal networks are important – and risk managers should make use of both.

When it comes to bringing the informal network together with a formal approach, technologies and techniques from Enterprise 2.0 are a great fit: collaboration, search, tagging and aggregation are the keys to bridging the gap.

Networked Information Governance

For purposes of the discussion I referred to the approach as “Networked” Information Governance. Networked Information Governance = Information Governance + Enterprise 2.0. The idea for the name came from an excellent article published by Paul Strassman in 2001. At the time of its authoring in 2001, networked business models were continuing to grow in popularity, from the military to the most agile Fortune 2000 organizations. What it pre-dated was the radical advances in collaborative technologies would occur over the next few years. His introduction frames the problem:

“”Governance” is what information management is mostly all about. Information management is the process by which those who set policy guide those who follow policy. Governance concerns power, and applying an understanding of the distribution and sharing of power to the management of information technologies”

Governance may include “centralized” power, but traditional push-down models of architecture and standards only provide part of the solution. Implemented the wrong way, they hamper innovation and agility. We need standards for some stuff, or we can’t be agile or innovative – we’re always fighting fires. With a foundation of standards, we can distribute power and empower a community to be far more productive.

I described the approach by starting with more traditional principles for Information Governance and then focused on the additional areas (listed below) for Enterprise 2.0. I tried to avoid terms like mashups (relevant to aggregation and application of standards) but I did use some more familiar technology terms.

• Collaborative Community. Collaborative technologies can streamline communications to capture content in informal network as well as build the formal.

• Organizing the Informal Network. Build a content model that is easily populated through user-driven categorization, informal collaboration begins to take on more formal structures.

• Aggregation of Ideas. Not all good ideas have to come from the inside. Social Computing techniques provide an easy way to bring linked content together.

• Linking the Informal to Formal. The same principle of applying content categories can be applied to formal governance processes.

• Searching the Knowledge Network. Enterprise Search techniques should be implemented to make this information easily accessible.

• Collaborative Asset Management. The maturity of your business and technology assets should be a known quantity and this information easily shared across the organization.

• Global Standards Bodies. Having an external perspective through a central authority can help to balance competing interests and work to a similar approach.

If you want to see the approach in more detail, you can reference it as part of the Open Methodology Framework.

Governance 2.0

Can this approach be extended beyond Information Governance? I believe it can. Governance techniques can generally benefit from this approach – from a corporate board decisions to managing compliance with environmental regulations. I see some of the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 as enabling agility when we are formal (e.g. long-tail development) and more organised when we are informal (e.g collaboratively developing a solution). When we bring it together (e.g. collaborating on an architecture design standard) the value-add really comes in.

In summary, if you are trying to implement Enterprise 2.0 you may find that your biggest allies will come from some of the places you least expect to find it. Risk and Compliance leaders feel the pain of knowledge loss and transparency issues. Speak to them about their issues and then talk about Enterprise 2.0 and you’ll see some lights go on. Then send them a link to TechCrunch.