(SAN
JOSE, CA) “Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms by
organizations in pursuit of their goals,” says the man who coined the phrase,
Andrew McAfee, Principal Research Scientist, Center for Digital Business, MIT
Sloan School of Management; Author, Enterprise 2.0.
“A key
word is emergent… we’ve always been good at imposing things on people,” adds
McAfee, who was addressing the KM World 2009 conference in San Jose. “What
we’re now doing is not dictating what people need to do… but instead throwing
out a technology blank slate, and letting people fill it in.”
Key ingredients
for Enterprise 2.0 success:
Altruism: People want to help
(stop obsessing about risks)
Process: Beware of the ‘one
best way’ (use tools that let structure appear)
Innovation: Expertise is
emergent (build communities that people want to join)
Intelligence: Crowds can be
very wise (experiment with collective intelligence)
Impact: Sitting this one out
is a bad idea (look at technology with fresh eyes
“I think
it’s (Enterprise 2.0)as big a leap
forward in the 90s as enterprise-level technology (e.g. ERP),” stresses McAfee.
“We’re not going back to business as usual.”
However,
McAfee emphasized that failure is common and that it is, in fact, easy to
‘snatch’ defeat from the ‘jaws of victory’ by not avoiding some common barriers:
Declare war on the enterprise
(“Its bad marketing to management.”)
Allow walled gardens to
flourish (silos kill)
Accentuating the negative
(spend less time on the risks)
Try to replace email
Fall in love with features
(we don’t want more, keep it simple)
Overuse the word “social”
McAfee
concluded his keynote address to KM World 2009 with the following quote from
futurist Norbert Weiner in 1954: “The world of the future will be an even more
demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a
comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot
slaves.”
Bill Ives
brought to my attention ECMHUB 2.0
“described as the world's largest mashup focusing on the ECM and KM industries
and married it to web collaboration.”
”First they created a generic Yahoo Pipe that reads Google Spreadsheet
information that lists hundreds of ECM industry RSS feeds including blogs,
news, webcasts, questions, RFPs, and videos. Then they take the feeds and
caches them into Google. Using Google App Engine they built an "on
demand" feed caching and refresh application. This means the latest
articles are instantly retrievable within only a few seconds and the individual
feeds are automatically rebuilt with a push of a button. They then built
"cloud communities" around the feeds adding comments, ratings, web
conferencing, and 3D chat. Currently, they have support for over 40 communities
with over 5,000 daily articles. Finally they wrap the entire application using
Javascript with an AJAX foundation. The site says that
"this means instead of navigating from page to page like a traditional
website, you navigate by retrieving web page data on demand. When you click on
a community, for instance, the main page area will clear and show an animated
star indicating that new data, such as the latest news, is currently
loading."
The folks in IT, communications and marketing are quick to understand and own the intranet. Their brethren in HR are often a little further behind them in terms of understanding and seizing the opportunity presented by the intranet and its associated technology.
There are far too many HR departments that just don’t get it: the intranet is a major recruitment, retention, and training tool. Employees and new employees are increasingly looking to the intranet as THE source for job related information, culture and communications.
The "Improving Front-line Training Practices 2008" report highlights a number of key learnings that all HR managers, and intranet managers and owners regardless of their position and title within the organization, should know:
• More money on training - According to the American Society for Training & Development, companies are spending more per employee on training and the average number of hours of formal learning per employee is increasing.
• More money on technology - The use of technology to deliver learning content has increased and companies are also spending more on external services like content design, development and delivery or technology infrastructure.
• Internet speed - Training and training delivery systems are changing, slowly but surely evolving to take advantage of the power of the Internet, mobile communications, and handheld technologies, the technologies that are changing society itself.
• The individual - Technological advancement has made it possible and practical to shift from classroom training to individualized learning.
• SMEs - More and more subject matter experts are assuming the training role.
• eLearning - More live instruction is being delivered remotely or online and more and more self-paced or computer-based training is being offered to busy employees, making it even more convenient to brush up on skills or learn a new procedure.
• PDAs - Training that is portable, self-directed, and available on-demand is becoming popular, through pod casts, PDAs, or even mobile phones.
• Virtual training - Simulation technology is also being more widely implemented, allowing learners to realistically "try the job" before actually on the job (e.g. Second Life).
The report also states that, more so than ever before, an organization's training function is being run like any other business function with increased attention on operational efficiency, accountability, and connection to organizational strategy.
The report also cites an Ascent Group study in 2005 that is still precisely relevant today (but underscores what all of us should have known all-along): “the Intranet is overwhelmingly the most effective job aid & training tool for new front-line employees.”
The study asked participants to “share management tactics and strategies, as well as identify any improvement in performance. The study also asked companies to include considerations, successes, and plans moving forward.”
Among its many uses, organizations are using the intranet to post:
There are small start-ups, emerging vendors, and the big enterprise portal and CMS vendors – all are developing and flaunting enterprise 2.0 software (social software). And none of these solutions are perfect.
In fact, even the big guns (e.g. BEA and Microsoft) haven’t figured it out yet. “Your WCM, Collaboration, Portal or ECM system may provide many (but not all) social software services, but some of them may suck,” says CMS Watch founder Tony Byrne.
Though not as broad and deep as the more mature CMS market, the emerging Enterprise 2.0 software market is rapidly growing with hundreds of vendors. Understanding those vendors and all of the emerging solutions is extraordinarily difficult, and would probably require a full-time team just to understand the leading vendors and solutions.
Byrne is an expert on evaluating software solutions (and of course has made a name for himself and a business from his CMS expertise demonstrated at www.CMSWatch.com). Tony provided a summary overview of the current marketplace in a presentation to the Enterprise 3 conference in San Diego, and offered some insights on the bigger enterprise infrastructure software vendors (which would include BEA, IBM, Microsoft, and other biggies).
Though Tony’s analysis and scoring of a solution feature is often done on a 4-point scale across many different categories, here’s my dimmed-down interpretation listed as either a general strength or weaknesses of the big gun vendor’s social software solutions (often bundled with their portal and/or CMS solution):
Strengths:
Most of the tools are good at spam and naughty word filtering (though missing in the BEA products)
Personalization
Specialized handheld delivery (particularly important in Europe)
Vocabulary, tagging and cloud services
Weaknesses:
Multi-installation management (“Almost always the answer is “no!” … SharePoint is a perfect example)
Repository versioning, version control, and search
Composite application development
Workflow and process management
Configuration management – version control of the system and platform (as opposed to the content)
Internationalization & localization
Standards compliance
Without question, however, the big guns generally have very shallow solutions that do not compare to the feature-rich and robust solutions of the new start-ups and emerging enterprise 2.0 vendors. But of course, the risks of purchasing a solution from a start-up is inherent – you trade long-term solution viability (i.e. financial strength of the vendor) for less cost and more leading-edge (i.e. bleeding edge).
Tony also provided an introductory analysis of one emerging solution vendor, cited by Gartner as a “Cool Vendor” last year, ConnectBeam. Connectbeam is a turnkey appliance with “an integrated set of social software applications for information sharing and team collaboration”. In short, ConnectBeam is a solution that allows employees to create rich profiles and to tag and share (social bookmark) content.
Specifially, ConnectBeam lists amongst its product features:
Social Bookmarking & Tagging
Social Networking
Project communities
Expert location
Collective Intelligence (search toolbar)
Users can import their browser bookmarks and their Deli.co.us bookmarks and share those with other employees as tagged content or via their own profiles (it comes with plug-ins for IE and Firefox (not all vendors have a FireFox vendor).
In a very cursory review (he did an admirable job in a short, one-hour presentation), Tony summed-up ConnectBeam as being good at information filtering, security and access control; but weak for group discussion, creating content, and people finding – and does not come with any RSS feeds. It also has low visibility and therefore its long-term future is not yet known.
Some of Tony’s other recommendations and cautions:
Socializing software is good, but its is not the same as social software (i.e. just because it’s a good portal solution doesn’t mean it’s a good social software platform)
The concept of social software is old, but many of the dominant technologies are immature
Don’t lose site of proper software evaluation techniques
“There is a notion that the tool itself will engender informal ways of working and that you can be similarly casual when introducing a new tool (i.e. social software such as a wiki)…” adds Byrne. “But you shouldn’t leave behind every thing you know about performance, security, and the long-term viability of the vendor.”
In short, due diligence is necessary when evaluating any technology solution.
You can view Tony’s research and summaries of some of his and his analyst’s now famous reports at www.CMSWatch.com.
It was a buzz word for many years that hasn’t generated much buzz as of late. I’ve not heard a client nor any conference attendee nor read anyone posting a question to this blog or e-mail me anything on the subject in at least 18 months. A quick search on Google News finds only a handful of stories in the past week. But one such tidbit caught my eye and perhaps provides a hint that KM is heating-up again: According to Bain & Company's Management Tools & Trends 2007 study, KM, for the first time, ranks among the top-10 "most used" tools.
For the record, the top 10 tools cited by executives (a survey of 1200 executives from around the World):
Strategic planning
Customer relationship management
Customer segmentation
Benchmarking
Core competencies
Mission & vision statements
Outsourcing
Knowledge management
Business process reengineering (tied for 8th)
Scenario & contingency planning (tied for 8th)
For those keeping score, KM isn’t just a tool though. In fact, it’s not a tool at all. KM is a business discipline built around people and process, and supported by technology. And there are many tools in the field of KM (see The lost meaning of knowledge management, written almost a year ago to the day, for a full definition and overview of KM).
However, viewed as a tool in the context that Bain uses, KM is increasingly important. Not surprisingly though is this telling statistic: in the top 25 most used tools, KM is the least satisfactory off all the tools (save for RFID which narrowly beat out KM for least satisfactory). In other words, the biggest gap between importance and satisfaction is awarded to KM.
In short, effective KM requires cultural adoption and change management with strong, well defined practices for sharing knowledge, and multiple supporting technologies (including intranet, document management, collaborative tools, etc.).
Create focused, managed directories of acknowledge experts in subjects that matter to a lot of people in your organization.
Provide employees with a desktop search tool and show them how to use it effectively.
Provide 'cheat sheets' to users that show how to organize (and name) documents on your hard drive and messages in e-mail folders.
Use RSS and encourage people to publish their information on blogs.
Create a template for requesting information that is needed in a hurry where the requestor isn't sure who to ask for it (via e-mail, IM or other routing system).
Teach people how to do research, not just search: This skill isn't just for information professionals.
Clearly KM is important – and very important to executives. And yet intranet managers don’t seem to be doing much about it…
(Just an interesting side note from the study: 30% of companies use blogs, with a satisfaction rate of 3.39 out of 5.)
I agree with most of Tony’s predictions, but I think there are bigger ones at play. I know I said I don’t do these predictions but since my company is called ‘Prescient’ I feel compelled to become a hypocrite.
The year 2007 will see:
Microsoft crank-up the marketing of Sharepoint leading to more and more customers buying without seriously examining alternative solutions
Standalone portal products will continue to be considerably out-done by CMS solutions
More vendors delivering a complete all-in-one solution that includes robust content management, search and portal functionality
Continued market consolidation with many more CMS vendors being bought, merged or disappearing
Dramatic growth in open source implementation and increased profile and functionality for bigger name solutions such as Zope, Alfresco, OpenCMS, and Plone
More and more organizations will convert PDF and MS-Word forms to online submission forms with a mixture of in-house and outsourced solutions
The search engine market will experience less growth than previous years as more organizations realize their current engine suffices and instead focus on content tagging, categorizing, process and policies
Discussion and focus on Knowledge Management (KM) will continue to decline as more organizations instead narrow their attention to specific tools such as Web 2.0 applications
More organizations will implement blogs and wikis, but they will still be part of a minority group; social bookmarking and podcasting will still remain little more than a fad on the intranet
Agree? Disagree? What other predictions will come true? Post your comment or question below.
