Three years ago we embarked on a journey of hosting an Enterprise 2.0 discussion through the FASTForward Blog. The aim of this blog was to drive and deepen conversation about how today’s companies can use technology to put users in control of information. It was home to the ongoing discussion about Enterprise 2.0 opportunities and challenges.

The FASTForward Blog like the Enterprise 2.0 discussion has had many ebbs and flows. When we started the discussions were focused on Enterprise 2.0 adoption and today we are moving towards convergence.

The conversation has shifted and the focus we had at the beginning has changed. Just look at Rob Patterson’s post “Is Shutting Down Social Networks the best response to unrest”, a quick look at how community and the police are using social media to help with cope with the rioters in the UK or the post about Designing Mobile Apps by Bill Ives.

Those two posts indicate that our content has evolved and our initial purpose has been fulfilled with widespread discussion of E2.0 occurring in businesses and organizations of all sizes.

With that in mind, we will be closing the FASTForward Blog. Microsoft has hosted this discussion and we think you will agree that it has offered a forum for some stimulating, thought provoking and at times controversial conversations and for that we are thankful and hope that you have found value in your visits.
We have asked our most active bloggers over the last year to post closing comments for you. Thank you for the opportunity to host the conversation.

This is a reflective piece, rather than 2.0 commentary. Credit to @ToughLoveforX who asked for more detail about something tweeted to him. I’ve often dropped crumbs of these stories, including a prior post.

I’ve learned two critical lessons from near-direct exchanges with Bill Gates. Clearly you can learn from both good and bad examples. I offer one of each.

To add a little context, I graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle, circa 1980, the early PC era. Right out of college I was lucky to stumble into a technology role, as an administrative assistant on assignment from a temp agency.

I remember one day when the guys were quite excited about something they’d found being sold in our own drug stores, in the camera department: a TRS-80 pocket computer. They exclaimed that the unit had more memory than the first big box in our shop (we still had a card punch machine on the floor, for fixes to old programs in use).

As the department ’secretary’, I did a lot of work for the manager who was the first and only person in the company to get an IBM PC, which operated with CP/M.  At this time Bill Gates was wooing IBM with his disk operating system, DOS. I quickly learned to generate documents in WordStar.

Ten years later, Bill Gates was still just an average, but well-known guy speaking at local events. After one event, gathered for the informal Q&A, I asked Bill a question grounded in things I was learning from a certificate program in Data Resource Management. I asked him when he was going to separate the files he was creating with his tools from the tools themselves. At that time, content wasn’t portable — it was ‘jailed’ by the tool that created it. He said that he didn’t understand the question — and that was my answer.

Bill’s focus was software. The fact that the software worked and created something was the goal. What happened beyond that wasn’t his responsibility. This mindset would prevail for another 10 years. I was shocked to learn that Office 2000 was the first major release where the various product teams were required to work with each other.

Another lesson I learned from Bill was in noticing a critical change in his public demeanor. At one time, especially onstage at their annual Symposium, Gartner analysts seemed to have developed a penchant for seeing who could make a CEO ‘lose it’. They would follow lines of questions that seemed to intentionally back technology leaders against the wall just to watch them squirm (or fake their way out). Bill was highly competitive. Over the years, when Gates was on stage with his competitors, you could feel the tension between them, and the analysts would bait them one against the another.

One year, mid 90’s, Gates was decidedly calm, even though he was onstage with the CEOs from Sun and Oracle. He sat back in his chair, rather than on the edge, and nothing the Gartner analysts said seemed to ruffle him. It almost felt like I was at a love fest, and there was a group hug about to break out. I was straining my neck (way in the back of a huge auditorium) to see if I could figure out what was going on. And then, in the line of questions, Bill offered the answer himself. He said, “I realized, this isn’t a zero sum game. When my competitors make a dollar, I make money too. The pie gets bigger.”

So what did I learn from Bill? You can make a whole lot of money solving a mass-appeal problem even if you just focus on the problem itself and not the larger context in which it lives. And, everyone can have major personal insights that fundamentally change the way they see things — where enemies suddenly become allys — when we look at what we have rather than what we have not.

Another 10 years has passed and I no longer have direct access to Bill. I know that his focus has changed considerably to the efforts of his foundation. And even there he is still learning: “the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the last decade breaking down big schools into small academies (it has since switched strategies, focusing more on instruction).”

Perhaps there are others out there with more recent ‘lessons from Bill’ that they can share.

Yesterday I had the opportunity of participating in a great webcast (recording of which I’m told will be posted to the FASTforward blog later today) with Richard Binhammer of Dell.com and Gary Koelling and Steve Bendt of Best Buy’s Blue Shirt Nation about “Putting the Social in Customer Experience”. Both Dell and Best Buy have been pushed the envelope in how they are engaging with their audiences – both internal and external – across their own online properties and out in other social networking experiences they don’t control. (As Richard said it best, “What’s the ROI on *not* engaging more closely with your audiences?” J) David Rogers of Columbia Business School did a very nice job in moderating helping these really innovative and smart guys explain how their companies are embracing social media experiences to collect market information, from customers and co-workers, and use that insight to build better products and serve customers better.

From Microsoft’s perspective, we in the Enterprise Search Group are excited to see more and more companies understanding how search is moving beyond just a search box to an enabler of compelling user experiences which bring the voice of the customer into the discovery, purchase and post-sale service process. The right search experience allows you to gather social intelligence and leverage where the social expertise flows, lives, and grows. Searching user-generated content and incorporating user behavior to drive social recommendations, can help your business build participatory communities to grow sales revenues for e-commerce sites, increase subscription and advertising revenues for media companies, and dramatically improve customer satisfaction.

Take ISP Telstra BigPond, Australia’s largest internet service provider, for example. BigPond uses search and recommendations technologies to track customer preferences, point online customers to music, games and video on demand, and to help customers recommend favorites to their friends from their huge range of entertainment services – ultimately building customer loyalty and revenue for their online properties.

As Microsoft’s Director of Business Insights, Dan Rasmus spends his time considering trends that will matter in the world of work and business. Dan’s scenario planning looks not to predict the future but forecast a variety of possible futures. This diversity of possible futures allows companies to develop strategies to succeed in an uncertain world. During his keynote he shared a series of macrotrends that will likely influence business in the coming years. We sat down to discuss scenario planning and some of the key influencers Dan shared during his keynote.

BIO: Daniel W. Rasmus, director of Business Insights for the Microsoft Business Division, guides the research process that allows Microsoft to envision how people will work in the future. Mr. Rasmus analyzes trends in technology, society, education, labor, and economics to devise scenarios used by Microsoft in developing products for tomorrow’s workforce. Before joining Microsoft in 2003, Mr. Rasmus was an analyst with Forrester Research where he invented conceptual frameworks for enabling the future of work, including adaptive work spaces and intelligent content services. He attended the University of California at Santa Cruz and received a certificate in intelligent systems engineering from the University of California at Irvine.

One of the advantages Enterprise 2.0 approaches offer in many situations is the relatively low or incremental prices at which technology is made available to organizations. It looks like things will even get more affordable.

A recent report from Forrester Research predicts the Enterprise 2.0 market is about to see impending “price drops” on tools ranging from blogs to wikis to social networks. Forrester analysts cite three specific reasons for the price drops:

“Commoditization, bundling, and subsumption. Increased competition and slowing innovation means that there is less differentiation between blogging solutions. Further, many vendors, from Microsoft to Six Apart, now offer a complete, enterprise-oriented suites that bundle a mature set of essential tools, which drives down prices for individual tools and specialized solutions.”

The increasing ubiquity of SharePoint — which supports many Enterprise 2.0 features — also may help to drive down prices from many other vendors, Forrester predicts.

The only area that may see price increases is software for handling mashups, Forrester predicts. “IT departments will prioritize mashup technology as part of portal, business intelligence, and business process management software investments as well as a major component of SOA implementations.”

There was a lot of discussion in the recent Enterprise 2.0 Conference posts by Bill Ives, Jevon MacDonald, and Jon Husband around issues in the deployment and management of the technology platforms for emergent 2.0 practices. As you know, we have always held that Search (the S in Andy McAfee’s SLATES model for E20) is the core “glue” in these platforms, pulling together concepts and people across the silos of project wikis, individual blogs, TownSquare-type enterprise Facebook projects, etc. Search becomes a core facility for knowing what you know as a firm and as an individual, and for keeping found things found and learned lessons learned.

As part of Microsoft, FAST is now working with the SharePoint team to help enable the growing base of 85 million Microsoft Office SharePoint Server licensees to integrate advanced search and discovery capabilities into their collaborative environments, including, of course, the SharePoint E20 applications.

It’s been around 45 days since Microsoft completed the acquisition of FAST, and now we are publishing tools to deliver interoperability between FAST ESP and Microsoft SharePoint Server in an open process. Today we posted a set of open downloadable FAST search Web Parts on CodePlex, Microsoft’s open source project hosting site for the developer community. See more about the details at the Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog or check out the SharePoint Team Blog.

These Web Parts are available as a free download and provide discrete pluggable services for such functions as including an advanced FAST ESP search box in any SharePoint project and for creating conversational results displays that allow SharePoint users to refine searches through navigating dynamic clusters of content. SharePoint administrators will be able to build FAST ESP-based search sites inside SharePoint Server 2007 by simply dropping in and configuring the appropriate components.

The Web Parts and Site Template are available as a free download from CodePlex at www.codeplex.com/espwebparts and are part of the Search Community Toolkit.

Look for the features, functionality and range of FAST ESP Web Parts to grow through contributions from the search developer community as well as further contributions from the Microsoft Enterprise Search Group.

Notwithstanding the points raised in recent and past posts about hesitation, resistance and other various challenges to E2.0 implementation and adoption as organizations circle it like a group of neighbourhood dogs nervously eyeing and sniffing a porcupine, it seems clear that eventually organizations will have to realize that the tools and services that comprise what we call Enterprise 2.0 are tools and services that address in fundamental ways how people do knowledge work.

It’s that simple … to do much of what we call knowledge work (other than filling in boxes on forms) people need to connect, talk, listen, point to sources and noodle together over ideas and new information.  They look, in conversations, for ways to stitch information and knowledge together so that it becomes useful.  That’s what humans have always done .. it’s only in the last 100 years or so that we have had the sequential arranging and measurement of tasks and highly-structured division of labour that we have understood as work during most of this lifetime.  As Bill Ives points out in the previous post, things are changing, and (relatively) fast, even though I am fond of the phrase "it takes a long time for change to happen quickly"  (think about that for a second).

One more piece of evidence that "organizations will have to realize …" is the recent announcement that Microsoft is testing, and may offer the corporate market, a Facebook-like application called TownSquare, a business-user-focused social networking application..  Whether one think Microsoft is the answer to E2.0 for their organization or not is not the point here … the point is that most or all of the large vendors are now adding features and functionality (or acquiring them) such that the platforms being used to support the work of knowledge workers will have been substantially re-tooled  before another 5 years passes.  And that re-tooling will consist largely of social computing capabilities.

And then there’s the culture issue

Will Management 2.0 be needed before or after an organization addresses E2.0 ?

The excerpt on Microsoft below via ZDNet:

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Microsoft to show off a corporate Facebook-like prototype
Mary-Jo Foley

Office Labs – an incubator within Microsoft testing business-focused technologies that may or may not end up part of future Microsoft products — is showing off this week yet another of its ideas.

The latest, known as “TownSquare,” is a business-user-focused social-networking tool. According to Computerworld, Microsoft will demo the new offering at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston on June 12.

TownSquare, via a layout similar to Facebook’s, provides internal company information, ranging from promotions and anniversaries, to a list of shared-document modifications pertinent to individual users.

TownSquare was launched inside Microsoft in January, according to the aforementioned report, and has been test driven by 8,000 Microsoft employees so far.

Microsoft has been stepping up its work on a number of other social-networking-related projects throughout the company. At its TechFest research fair earlier this year, Microsoft officials showed off a FriendFeed-like aggregation tool, codenamed C2, which is likely to find its way into Windows Live for Mobile some time in the relatively near future. And earlier this week, Microsoft rolled out a test build of a SharePoint Server plug-in for producing/managing podcasts.

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I’m happy to report that Microsoft has filed with the Oslo Stock Exchange announcing that it is closing its tender offer for FAST shares (see Zia’s post back in January about the initial offer). The filing states that it has acquired 97.37% of the shares of the company. This means that FAST is now part of Microsoft, with the new designation: FAST, A Microsoft® Subsidiary.

The net of this is that the FAST team moves intact into a much-expanded Microsoft Enterprise Search Group (MESG, for those collecting new acronyms). We are particularly excited about the charter for this new group, which is to invest to be the industry leader developing the most innovative technologies for the widest range of customers and greatly expanding what has traditionally been viewed as the “search space.”

This direction is one that long-time analysts of the search space (myself included) have pointed to as the most likely development as search becomes more and more central to all of our online activities. We are still just at the beginning of the changes we see coming, which we see accelerating on the foundation of three core elements of the Microsoft search vision:

Search will be everywhere.
Search will enable unique user experiences.
Search will change the way people do business.

I wanted to share with FASTforward Blog readers what Kirk Koenigsbauer, Microsoft Sharepoint General Manager and the business executive behind the acquisition had to say today on Microsoft’s Enterprise Search blog. Kirk’s post:

FAST Tender Offer Complete!

Well, it has been a while since I last posted – but for good reason. Aside from our usual day-to-day efforts to deliver great enterprise search solutions for our customers, we’ve also been feverishly working on the acquisition of FAST Search & Transfer that we originally announced on January 8. Today, I’m excited to share that the tender offer is complete!

As I mentioned in January, FAST has an incredibly talented team of folks who bring great customer focus and tremendous expertise in the category – more than 60% of their people are engineers and close to 50 of them have PhDs in relevant fields. One of their true visionaries, John Markus Lervik, who has been FAST CEO, will transition to become Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of Enterprise Search. John’s leadership will have an immediate impact on the development across our comprehensive portfolio of enterprise search offerings – including Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express , search for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and FAST ESP – and will result in the future delivery of a single enterprise search platform. I’m thrilled to welcome our new team members on board and am eager for them to get started!

By bringing together our two companies, customers will no longer have to compromise when evaluating the enterprise search solution that’s best for them. We can now meet all their needs no matter how basic or complex: Search Server Express available as a free download; SharePoint offers search integrated with other business productivity tools; and for those with highly sophisticated needs, FAST ESP provides best-in-class capabilities for the most demanding search applications in both internal and customer-facing scenarios. And, you can be assured that with our expanded team in place, we’ll be in an even better position to continue innovation across all three products, including FAST ESP on Linux and UNIX.

Speaking of Linux and UNIX, some people may be (mis)interpreting our continued support and investment in these platforms as a broader change for Microsoft – so here’s some color. We’re making a pragmatic decision to continue to delight a core part of FAST’s customer base that has chosen the Linux/UNIX OS. You can bet that we’ll innovate on Windows, too, and over time we hope customers will see .NET as a preferred platform choice.

Net, our approach doesn’t imply any kind of broader change for our company in its strategy (so conspiracy theorists can stand down ) and you shouldn’t expect to see SharePoint running on UNIX. We’re making a business decision for enterprise search and feel great about what it means for our FAST search customers.

Getting to this point has been quite a journey, but the most exciting part about it for me is that we are only just getting started. Whether it’s ensuring customers continue to get great service from the people and support teams they know or building on the span of our product portfolio, I’m confident that the combination of Microsoft and FAST will serve customers’ needs more broadly and help make enterprise search become a truly ubiquitous tool that is central to how workers find and use information.

I look forward to sharing more with you as the journey continues.

Kirk Koenigsbauer
General Manager,
SharePoint Business Group

I recently completed work on a survey report for Evans Data measuring the impact and trends shaping Web 2.0 projects within the enterprise.

The survey of 385 corporate managers and developers covered Web 2.0-based development mechanisms — such as mashups and gadgets/widgets — as well as social networking tools. Both types of environments are now very much a part of the corporate scene, and have become important tools for corporate applications, the survey finds.

Demand for Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 talent is hot, as a matter of fact. Two out of three respondents say their demand for such talent will increase over the coming year. That’s because there is a lot of strategic business-to-business and internal business development going on by software developers in the survey. Developers are working on Web 2.0 software for business applications in several areas, including interface design, gadgets and widgets, and social networking.

Most Web 2.0 applications are being targeted at internal corporate requirements, versus consumer engagements. Close to half of the survey participants are focused on developing applications for internal use inside their companies. Less than a third are building Web 2.0 applications intended for delivery on a subscription base to online users.

Forty percent of interfaces for Web 2.0 applications are “mixed” web-rich clients that include AJAX for fast downloads of pages that include live feeds of data (gadgets) and other dynamic components found in Web 2.0 applications. An overwhelming majority of respondents are using gadgets and widgets (portable Web parts) from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and others to deploy fast, lightweight business applications and services.

More than four out of ten companies encourage social networking; however, most feel the business value still needs to be demonstrated at this time. Social networking is strongest among developers in scientific and technical fields, who see social networking as a communications and collaboration medium, and among OEMs and systems integrators, who see benefits in product delivery.

… is that the contributors to this blog have for the past nine months or more been analyzing and opining upon the issues about Enterprise 2.0 takeup and implementation that are highlighted by this article in today’s ZDNet by Dennis Howlett.

Notwithstanding a substantial amount over the past two years of online and offline "press" about the Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 phenomena and the increasingly participative and interactive online environment (first for consumers and now increasingly apparent as "the" future for the workplace), decision-making about enterprise software in general continues to warily circle the issues involved with implementing community-based collaboration or more broadly defined, "social computing".

You’ll note that in the article (excerpt below) Dennis checks in with FASTForward’s Jevon Macdonald, who is of the opinion that Microsoft Sharepoint may well be the safe, "default" implementation of choice.  Certainly Sharepoint has developed some key alliances over the past year that seem designed to support that point of view.

Here’s a You Tube video (also featured in Dennis’ article .. thanks for the pointer, Dennis) that presents a wide range of views on the question "Enterprise 2.0 -  Hype or Happening?"

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Enterprise 2.0 – Hype or Happening ?

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In the ZDNet article Dennis (and Jevon) make a key point about value propositions.  That said, getting an enterprise IT shop to listen seriously to the value proposition of  a small startup is a key challenge in and of itself, regardless of how good it is.

I also believe (even after a decade or more of general agreement that functional stovepipes and silos are not helpful) that a large number of enterprises do not really know how to come to grips with regular and continuous flows of information across functional boundaries and throughout the organization.  And it’s quite likely they won’t be able to come to grips with using such flows effectively (in any practical sense) until the architecture of their IT systems enables it and supports it, and the management learns, and practices with, using these flows to feed effective collaboration.

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The end of software…

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 6:43 am

…as you know it. Right now I’m falling over startup vendors vying for attention in the so-called ’social software’ space. The fact enterprise people hate the term doesn’t seem to bother those who are bypassing IT as they sell into the marketing departments of companies at departmental budget prices. But there is a battle brewing on two fronts.

First, we have the mega vendors who think they ‘own’ the enterprise but have little clue what they’re doing when it comes to providing community style collaborative software. As Barry Libert, chairman of Mzinga said to me: “Does Microsoft have a relationship with me? Do any of the ‘monster’ vendors?” Second, we have the startups who are largely making their money by selling social media style solutions to marketers. While the two solution sets may look the same from the outside, they are being bought in fundamentally different ways and are setting up a tension that today is barely felt but which will have a disruptive effect on the software buying patterns of the future.

It is particularly appropriate that Phil Wainewright has penned an article dubbed Enter the socialprise as this plays directly to the themes I am currently exploring.

He says:

But enterprise computing is still designed for the old, stovepipe model in which every transaction took place within the same firm. There’s no connection with the social automation that’s happening between individuals.

[ Snip ... ]

I then spoke to another Irregular, Jevon MacDonald who has been working in the so-called Enterprise 2.0 (aka socialprise) space for some time. He said that where the startups fail but where the incumbents succeed is in identifying a specific value proposition within specific industries.

His view is that Sharepoint will be a ‘big winner in the next five years.’ If the amount of noise being made by Microsoft is indicative, then it should be a winner. But…he also says: “Sharepoint deployments are horrendous and I really don’t know why people put up with them.”

I do. They keep IT shops busy.  (Read the whole article here)

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