Archive for Enterprise 2.0
by Joe McKendrick
July 31, 2011 at 12:45 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Social Media, Web 2.0
In many aspects o technology business innovation, maturity models have served to define stages of development, serving as benchmarks for companies to see how far along they have progressed. The model serves as a guideline for process improvement. For example, the Capability Maturity Model Integration Framework (CMMI), first published at Carnegie-Mellon University, has served as a set of guidelines for software development.
Now. IDC has proposed a similar approach for social enterprise development, called the Social Business Maturity Model, which is intended to help companies that are growing in their adoption of social business and want to optimize their use of social tools.
IDC’s Social Business Maturity Model consists of 5 stages:
- Experimentation
- Compartmentalization
- Integration
- Operationalization
- Optimization
Do these identified stages make sense for identifying where organizations stand on the social enterprise spectrum? The final stage, optimization, suggests that it isn’t until this point that significant benefits are being delivered to the business.
by Bill Ives
July 19, 2011 at 3:37 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Mobile
Forrester’s TJ Keitt recently released a useful report, Demystifying The Mobile Workforce. This is an increasingly important topic as two-thirds of the information workforce already work remotely, according to Forrester data. With the adoption of tablets such as the iPad and the proliferation of smart phones in the enterprise, that number figures to grow significantly. It is a matter of when, not whether that mobile devices exceed desktops.
In this new research, Forrester defines the five types of information workers based on its data and provides a template for provisioning mobile resources to these employees. Forrester believes that IT can no longer take a one-size-fits-all approach to workforce technologies and must provision mobile and other information technologies based upon workforce segmentation. Instead of force fitting mobile technologies into an overall workforce framework, “ontent and collaboration professionals now must have a mobile-first mindset when designing workplace policies,” according to the report
“The bottom line is that if businesses are to smartly plan for and provision a mobile workforce, they need to have a firm grasp of what the issues are related to these workers, TJ Keitt, wrote in his post on the report, “Anywhere, Anytime” Work Means IT Must Provide The Right Technology, To The Right Person, At The Right Time.
The report provides data to support the five types of information workers and to demonstrate their technology preferences. The five types include: Back-Office Employees comprising 34% of the workforce: Hyper-Mobile Professionals constituting 33% of the workforce, Connected Consultants covering 16% of the workforce, Part-Time Telecommuters comprising 11% of the workforce, and Remote-Based Technicians. Who represent 5% of the workforce. The report provides a matrix of communication use by each of these five types with some differences.
Each of the types of users require a somewhat different approach. The report suggests that we start by mapping use cases to workers’ responsibilities. Then assess the business process changes needed to encourage adoption as well as tap power users to help drive mobile adoption. You also need to provide training to workers who have not been fast adopters. It also encourages organizations to streamline the number of devices workers use and, at the same time, extend mobile support to a broader set of workers.
There are a lot of useful suggestions in this report for what is a relatively new field. At the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference there was a mobile track for the first time. Here is on example session: My 2011 Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes: Got Strategy? How to Capitalize on the Mobile Revolution.
If you are in the process of developing a mobile strategy I recommend this report.
by Bill Ives
July 13, 2011 at 8:04 pm · Filed under
Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Social Media
I recently spoke with Deb Lavoy, Director of Product Marketing for Digital and Social Media at OpenText, about promoting collaboration and enterprise design in the 21st century. She began by noting that we are moving from a mechanistic model for organizations to a more human model. I could not agree more. People are much more than machines and it is time to leave Fred Taylor behind.
Deb mentioned that a key differentiator is employee motivation. I have recently seen research to support her position. For example, a study by consulting firm Blessing White found only 33 percent of North American workers engaged in their jobs. Further research has shown that low engagement levels have a proven negative impact on business performance. That would make sense. A study from HR consultancy Towers Watson found that organizations with high employee engagement had a 19 percent increase in operating income versus a 32 percent drop for companies with low levels of engagement.
Deb said that one way to create engagement is with a clear sense of purpose for the organization. This was part of her keynote at the recent Boston Enterprise 2.0 Conference. She said that in the firms she has worked with she have found one single predictor of success. It is a sense of purpose. Even the best people are not successful without a sense of purpose.
Deb expanded on this is a recent blog post, The Pursuit of (Organizational) Purpose. She notes that, ”in a purpose driven organization, every conversation, every meeting is infused with “how do we get better at making this important difference” The company is creating value faster than its taking it out of the market. The purpose acts as the primary criteria for decision-making. Without a purpose, there is only the balance sheet and politics… People become competitive, self-protective kingdom builders.” I have certainly seen this dysfunctional behavior many times. I have also seen the power of a shared sense of purpose. Once you experience this you do not want to go back.
Deb went on to discuss three types of collaboration. First there is creative collaboration that is intended to create something. It could be a product team, a legal team, a team responsible for an RFP, or a marketing launch. There is a specific goal in mind and this goal requires more than what an individual can provide. In a blog post on the topic Deb explains that with this type of collaboration, “what we need to do to encourage such collaboration is make it easy for teams to form, communicate, get organized, contribute, aggregate and iterate on work.”
The second type is connective collaboration that “refers to connecting with a broader community – the organization as a whole, or even more broadly than that… The goal of this type of collaboration is to connect dots – find expertise and resources as you need them.” There are different requirements here as connective collaboration “requires a broad, loosely connected community that can maintain awareness of activity, and ideally, technology that helps them find, discover or get pinged about relevant information, resources, insight and expertise - that they may or may not have been aware of – elsewhere in the system.” This is where monitoring systems and activity streams can create an ambient awareness and help you follow the pulse of the organization.
Third, there is compounding collaboration which is designed is to “ensure that whatever our endeavor, we are leveraging, to the greatest extent possible, the work that has been done already.” This was one of the goals of knowledge management and now we have much better tools for this purpose. I was involved in a number of these initiatives in the 1990s and wish we had today’s tools at that time.
Deb notes that compounding collaboration is much more than collecting documents. I could not agree more. The documents frequently become out of date as soon as they written, and even when still current, they require a greater context of what people did than is usually recorded. As Deb notes in old school KM efforts failed because the documentation was separate form the work. I would agree but only add that not all 1990s KM went down this path. All of the successful ones that I observed where process aligned and work centric. The new tools make it easier to be work centric and add the additional dimension of being people centric.
This people centric capability, along with the flexibility of the new social tools, allows the technology to support how people work rather than having people conform to the structure imposed by the technology as we experienced with traditional enterprise apps.
I found that looking at collaboration through these three types is very useful as there are different goals and different uses of tools within each type. Within Enterprise 2.0 all three types need to be supported.
by Joe McKendrick
July 11, 2011 at 11:51 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Social Computing, Social Media
We’ve been talking at this blogsite about the potential of Social customer relationship management (CRM), in which typical CRM – an internally generated and maintained collection of knowledge about customers and their interactions with a company – is enhanced with information streaming in from the virtual communities that now are part of many customers’ experiences.
As part of my work with Insurance Networking News, I had the opportunity to talk with insurance executives and analysts about the viability of Social CRM within this industry, which relies intensely on trust and the goodwill of customers. Frankly, it was difficult to identify insurance companies that had Social CRM programs that they were willing to talk about at this early stage.
I spoke with Craig Beattie, analyst with Celent, who observes that much of the push toward Social CRM is currently coming from the vendor side: “Insurers aren’t really thinking about this yet. The kinds of offerings you get from vendors tend to focus on views of the customer, with all their emails, phone calls and policies, and alongside that, Facebook entries or tweets that might be relevant – a blending with public data, to get some idea of the kind of conversations people might be having. We haven’t seen insurers employ it yet for underwriting purposes, pricing purposes, or getting along better with clients.”
Current survey data shows Social CRM to still be in its infancy – though its likely uptake may be fast and furious over the next few years. A recent survey of 3,342 marketing directors by MarketingSherpa found that six percent of companies already had functioning Social CRM efforts underway, but a whopping 56 percent were planning such initiatives in the near future. Gartner, in the meantime, predicts 30 percent of companies will extend their social networking efforts to Social CRM processes within the next two years.
One company that is leading the way on this front is Farmers Insurance, which began its Social CRM effort in earnest last fall. I spoke with Marc Zeitlin, vice president of eBusiness at Farmers Insurance, about the effort, which involves the sharing of information, via Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn among its network of 15,000 agents, enables the company to better compete against direct-to-consumer insurers. And the effort is delivering along many fronts, according to Zeitlin: “We’re driving growth and new business, as well as customer retention. We also gain product knowledge and service. We’re able to determine whether there’s a need in the market that we’re not meeting.”
Ultimately, Social CRM will lose its cachet, simply becoming a part of normal CRM. But until then, the industry has just begun to explore the possibilities this new dimension of data provides.
by Bill Ives
July 8, 2011 at 4:43 am · Filed under
Big Data, Enterprise 2.0, Social Media, Web 2.0
Big Data is a hot topic. I went to a session on Big Data Analytics for Social Media at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference. Computerworld reported on an IDC study that predicts we will see a 50 times increase in the world’s data in the next ten years. In 2011 alone they report that 1.8 zettabytes (or 1.8 trillion gigabytes) of data will be created. This is the equivalent to every U.S. citizen writing 3 tweets per minute for 26,976 years. Then over the next decade, the number of servers managing the world’s data stores will grow by ten times to match the 50 times increase in data. The report adds that IT execs will likely have trouble finding enough people with the skills and experience to manage this increase This is all covered in the fifth annual IDC Digital Universe study.
This data growth is fueled, in part, by the spread of smart devices such as sensors in clothing, medical devices, and structures like buildings and bridges. In addition, unstructured information – such as files, email and video – will account for 90% of all data created over the next decade. Some of this growth is through the rise of high bandwidth data such as videos.
There is some good news as new hardware and software has driven the cost of creating, capturing, managing and storing information down to one-sixth of what it was in 2005. This is likely why servers will only grow ten times while the data they store will grow fifty times. Relative costs have also dropped as since 2005 the annual investments by enterprises in hardware, software and cloud services technologies, along with the staff to manage information, has only increased 50% to $4 trillion.
The cloud accounts for some of the cost reduction and will account for more going forward. Today, cloud computing accounts for only 2% of all IT spending. However, by 2015, though, close to 20% of all information will be attached to cloud services some way, and as much as 10% will reside in a cloud infrastructure, IDC stated.
According to David Reinsel, IDC’s vice president of storage and semiconductor research, the next step is to enable companies to better extract value out of their mountains of data, via big data analytics. “This is where real opportunities lie, and where some folks may miss the boat. As soon as big data success stories are advertised and people see that there is gold in their data … then you will find more companies desiring to put more data online.”
Gartner also weighs in on this issue in a recent report. While the volume within big data is a significant issue, Gartner analysts “said the real issue is making sense of big data and finding patterns in it that help organizations make better business decisions.” I could not agree more.
Yvonne Genovese, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner: “The ability to manage extreme data will be a core competency of enterprises that are increasingly using new forms of information—such as text, social and context—to look for patterns that support business decisions in what we call Pattern-Based Strategy. Pattern-Based Strategy, as an engine of change, utilizes all the dimensions in its pattern-seeking process. It then provides the basis of the modeling for new business solutions, which allows the business to adapt…”
The ability to handle this explosion of data and make sense of it should be a priority of enterprises or they will be swamped in the next few years by both the data and their competitors.
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