Why Ideas Are Core to Enterprise 2.0

February 10, 2010 29 Comments

Brian Solis spoke recently on what the future of social networks will be. Ideas, it turns out. As I wrote on another blog post:

Solis, leading thinker in the integration of social media and PR, recently spoke on an intriguing concept: ideas connect us more than relationships. The premise of his argument is that ideas are what elicit passion in people. They animate us, and if we find someone with a similar interest in a given idea, we connect.

Then there was this observation by Intel’s Enterprise 2.0 lead Laurie Buczek on the only quantifiable value they found in their Enterprise 2.0 efforts:

Where we did quickly find quantifiable business value during an ideation proof of concept.  Ideas that are discovered and turned into action have produced dollarized return of business value.

Both Brian and Laurie are pointing to the unique nature of ideas. Brian talks of ideas as connectors. Laurie talks of ideas being “discovered”. If Enterprise 2.0 rests on delivering value through collaborative, emergent and social means, ideas are the top basis for leveraging these qualities.

Of course, from a pragmatic, what-do-businesses-care-about perspective, innovation is a top priority.

The top-down, Board-level importance of innovation is not a surprise. As I’ve seen repeatedly with our enterprise innovation work at Spigit, ideas are an excellent bottom-up basis for Enterprise 2.0.

Ideas Are Me

Credit: -: pranav :-

Perhaps the most important aspect of social is the ability to express what you’re thinking. Ideas fit this dynamic quite well. Ideas are…

Expressions of my creativity, ingenuity and problem-solving

Inside companies, we see things that we know can be improved. We see opportunities that need to be explored. We know a good answer for a particular challenge put forth by managers.

Every time you have an idea, a bit of you bonds to it. Your way of thinking, your understanding of context, the experiences you’ve had, the expertise you bring to bear, the work aspirations you have.

Ideas can be small, giving you satisfaction in fixing something obvious to you. They can be big, offering the possibility of work that elicits your passions.

This is powerful stuff. It is a unique intersection of something that helps the company with something that personally satisfies you.

Ideas Are the Basis for Finding Like-Minded Colleagues

When I post an idea, I create the basis for finding others. That because when I post an idea, I’m making…

Credit: cauchisavona

A call for your interest

Think about that. The act of publishing an idea is a broadcast across the organization. It’s a tentative query to see who else feels the same way. Or if not the same way, who has an interest that overlaps mine.

This is unique to ideas. Ideas are potential. They are a change from the status quo. There are others who share at least some aspect of your idea. In large, distributed organizations, where are these people?!!

My idea is my call to form my own virtual team, to see who can help me accomplish something of value to me and the organization. I contrast this with other types of activities one might do under the Enterprise 2.0 umbrella: status updates, project tasks, writing a common  document, adding content to knowledge wiki. Those aren’t calls to form virtual teams.

Ideas have a unique quality in team and community forming, consistent with the emergent nature of Enterprise 2.0.

Ideas Are Social Objects

A key consideration of any framework for interaction is, “what are we going to talk about?” Within the enterprise

Credit: Akshay

environment, an idea is…

A social object for our interaction

The concept of social objects is powerful. It illuminates the core basis for why two or more people interact. They share an interest in some thing. We are complex beings, with multiple different interests. We won’t ever match up  with someone else exactly in terms of what animates. But social objects allow a sort of miniature Venn Diagram of our common interests to flourish.

Hugh MacLeod pragmatically notes, “The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else.”

Leading designer Joshua Porter, also known as Bokardo. In his post, Finding Innovation in Design, he describes the AOF method of social experience design:

  • A = activity you want to support
  • O = social objects that define the activity
  • F = features are actions people take upon social objects

You build social-oriented sites around a core set of objects and activities which attract people.

Ideas, because they represent something new, something that can affect your daily work, are terrific social objects. An idea is a proposal, and a natural basis for interacting. Contrast this with posting a document, or a page of knowledge, or a status update. Those are lower wattage, more ephemeral social objects.

Ideas Become Projects

Ideas get attention. They propose to change things, and they will need work. An idea is…

The basis of a future project for us

Credit: The National Guard

What makes ideas so powerful is they are changes to the status quo. This means:

  • They’re going to affect people’s daily work
  • They require some work to make happen

This imbue ideas with a certain vitality. It gives them a power not seen with with other types of social computing activities, save projects themselves.

Another important aspect is that ideas will elicit passion in certain users, those we talked about earlier. If there is a chance to become part of a project team working on the idea, that is exciting. Consider times in your life you got to be part of a team, working on something that excited you.

Ideas have these qualities: possibilities, change to work routines, chance to be part of an exciting initiative. Projects have a certain aspirational quality for us employees, and ideas tap this aspect well.

There are many types of content and activities – social objects – that are part of a social computing initiative. I’d argue ideas, for a host of reasons, should be considered top amongst those social objects.

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In the Future We’ll All Have Online Reputation Scores

January 26, 2010 37 Comments

In a recent interview with EMC’s Stu Miniman about the future of the web, I predicted that in 20 years, we’ll all have online reputation scores. Little badges, numbers that communicate our level of authority, this sort of thing. And these reputations will have tangible impact.

Three different trends come together at some point in the future to make this happen. These trends have been underway for a while, but come together at some tipping point in the years ahead. Here’s a visualization of the trends:

It’s helpful to discuss each one, in the context of online reputations.

Rate performance of businesses

eBay, which went public back in 1998, played an important role in socializing the concept of people providing online ratings for online sellers. After we receive our purchase, we rate the seller. The collective wisdom identifies top sellers. Got your eye in that Donkey Kong game? Who are you most likely to trust…?

Amazon picked up on this, once it introduced third party sellers into the mix. You can see the percentage of positive ratings for the different sellers. Personally, I have paid premiums (i.e. higher prices) for the assurance that comes from a higher rated seller.

Yelp has taken this concept of rating a seller, and applied to offline consumer experiences. Want to get a burrito in San Francisco? You’re likely to go with the highest rated restaurants.

These ratings make up for our lack of information about various providers of services. One could do a lot of online research, and asking friends, before buying. But these ratings do quite well as shorthand ways of assessing quality. They’ve made it easy to transact, without knowing someone ahead of time.

The rating ethos is expanding. On Facebook, you can ‘like’ people’s entries. We ‘love’ music on Last.fm. We ‘favorite’ tweets. We ‘digg’ and ‘buzz up’ stories. Implicitly, we provide ratings when we share content via different social networks. Online engagement allows for this.

Migration of transparent work and information online

I found this recent Kaiser Family Foundation study fascinating. The amount of time kids spend online – smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device – is now at an all-time high. There’s no denying this: future workers are going to be more accustomed to online engagement and information-seeking than any generation before. It’s their lifestyle:

More generally, an important distinction from the web of the 1990s and early 2000s is that we aren’t just reading and transacting. Individuals are providing the content. More every day, in fact. We have transferred some of the engagement and contributions from the offline world online. Actually, we’re probably creating more content than we ever have,

For workers, the growth of Enterprise 2.0 continues. A key outcome of that? More and more work is making its way online. When it’s available there, and not just in a Word document on the hard drive or email in an inbox, it’s findable and usable by everyone.Your colleagues know quite well what the quality of your work and contributions are.

Do you think all of this stops, and we go back to message-relaying marathoners, smoke signals and carrier pigeons? No. Enterprise 2.0 and social media will continue their growth apace. And increasingly, this time spent online is through social media.

More and more people will be publishing their work, their ideas, their knowledge, their conversational bits, their creativity…online. It’s just going to keep increasing.

Rely on social media for information

An emerging trend is the transition of where we seek information. Remember libraries, magazines and microfiche? Then the 1.0 websites where we got information? Then the portals that aggregated information from major media sites? Then search augmented all this information consumption?

Well, the next wave is to rely on our social connections to deliver interesting, relevant information to us. As was famously said by a college student in 2008:

If the news is important, it will find me.

A recent Nielsen study confirms this growing tendency to use social media as a first stop to find information:

Admittedly, the leading social sites of today – blogs, Facebook, Twitter – have a ways to go before they become a large percentage of the population’s first choice. And it’d help if Twitter could get their search working further back than a week or two.

But this survey and anecdotal evidence points toward an increased reliance on others to provide information to us.

Putting this all together

It’s that last trend, still early in its cycle, that really points toward the development of formal, online reputations. When we started transacting online with complete strangers or small businesses we never knew, we needed a basis for understanding their credibility. It turns out, crowdsourced ratings are excellent indicators of quality. It also causes small businesses to be aware of the quality of their products and services.

In the years ahead, expect increased usage of social media for getting information and sourcing people, products and services. As an example, research firm IDC just released these survey results:

57% of U.S. workers use social media for business purposes at least once per week. The number one reason cited by U.S. workers for using social tools for business purposes was to acquire knowledge and ask questions from a community.

As reliance on people for information increases, expect an increased need for knowing which strangers provide the top quality information. Note I said “strangers” there. One thing we will continue to do is to rely on our “friends” (social media sense of the word) for ongoing daily information. The people we connect with on the various social sites.

But that’s the only way we will get information. Or make decisions. Great case in point? Google’s real-time search results:

If innovation is the focus of your work, wouldn’t you want to be include in those Google results? Here’s the thing. Google doesn’t just put any old tweet or other form of real-time content in there. As Google’s Amit Singhal stated:

“You earn reputation, and then you give reputation. If lots of people follow you, and then you follow someone–then even though this [new person] does not have lots of followers,” his tweet is deemed valuable because his followers are themselves followed widely, Singhal says. It is “definitely, definitely” more than a popularity contest, he adds.

Note his words: “You earn reputation“.

PR agency Edelman created a ranking algorithm called Tweetlevel, which analyzes people on the basis of influence, popularity, engagement and trust. Tweetlevel was recently used to create a list of the top analysts on Twitter. As the author of that post noted, one purpose for the list was to answer the question: “Should they spend their limited time interacting with analysts via twitter?” Presumably if you’re an analyst in the Top 50, ‘yes’.

Again, reputation being used for a defined purpose.

Ross Dawson wrote a good piece about the changes coming due to the increasing visibility of “people’s actions and character”. He notes the impact of reputation on seeking professionals for work:

Many professionals will be greatly impacted by these shifts. The search for professional advice is often still highly unstructured, based on anecdotal recommendations or simple searches. As importantly, clients of large professional firms may start to be more selective on who they wish to work with at the firm, creating a more streamlined meritocracy.

The mechanisms for measuring professional reputation are still very crude, yet over the coming decade we can expect to see substantial changes in how professionals are found. This will impact many facets of the industry.

And Bertrand Dupperin sees a similar dynamic playing out internally:

Use internal social networks to build a kind of marketplace that would put work capacity and competence on a given subject in relation with needs and allow those who can apply for an assignment instead of blind assignments to those who can’t.

In a world where individuals emerge as important sources of information, products and services, people will need a way to break through the limited knowledge they’ll have on any one person. Look for online reputations to emerge as a way to fill that gap.

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Why SMBs Need Social Software – Dunbar’s Number Limits Metcalfe’s Law

January 19, 2010 5 Comments

A general observation of collaborative work is this:

The larger and more diverse are your personal network of contacts,
the higher the quality of your ideas and project work.

In the enterprise market, the opportunity being seized by companies is to better connect employees. The sheer size of these firms makes it obvious that they are not optimizing collaborative activities. Social software plays an important role in helping that. SunGard’s CEO has a great take on this issue in the New York Times.

But what about small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs)? Do they have issues with maintaining connections? We’ll tackle that issue in a second. First, however…

WE by Spigit: Innovation Management for SMBs

Spigit is introducing its SaaS application for SMBs, called WE. WE leverages the enterprise functionality of enterprise Spigit, but streamlines the features to account for a self-service process and cost in tune with an SMB’s budget. The critical things firms need for innovation are there: easy idea entry, community feedback, workflow stages, analytics, individual reputation scores, multiple ways to filter for ideas, social profiles, connections, activity streams, etc.

It also reflects a slick new user interface, with multiple themes to choose from.

You can see more about WE innovation management for SMBs on the Spigit website. And read eWeek’s coverage of the release here.

The Challenge of Growth: Traditional Collaboration Modes Don’t Scale

When a small company starts out, it’s rather easy to stay on top of what colleagues are doing. There just aren’t too many of them. You easily banter, bounce ideas off one another and contribute your part to projects.

It’s natural human interactions.

The problem is that small businesses continue to rely exclusively on the tried-and-true methods of collaborative work as they grow. Keep on with the emails, the desk meetings, the lunches. Sure, it’s fun to keep with those who sit essentially in your visual perimeter. But it means you’re missing out on a lot of valuable ideas and insight from colleagues.

The graphic below shows the challenge of scale in collaborative work:

The easy interactions of old are now replaced by the departmental exchanges, and the daily work inherent in those micro environments.The small firm mentality that employees enjoyed with fewer employees is no longer applicable as the company expands.

Yet as research has shown, employees who are able to break out of departmental silos and leverage a diversity of connections perform better in terms of innovation.

So how does this fit SMBs?

Metcalfe’s Law Hits Dunbar’s Number

Metcalfe’s Law. Initially addressing fax machines, it speaks to the value of networks. Specifically:

The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected participants.

For those who study the value of information networks, this law makes sense. You increase your number of information sources. And all things being equal, the person with greater information has a decided advantage in term of:

  • Awareness of key issues
  • Long tail knowledge of different issues
  • Access to information that will solidify an idea
  • Identification of colleagues who can help advance an idea or a project
  • Different points of view and information that make up for the knowledge limitations we all have

Every new connection inside a company increases these information advantages, for all members of the network. The problem occurs when employees are only using traditional methods for making and accessing these connections: email, desk conversations, departmental meetings.

They run into Dunbar’s Number. I use Dunbar’s Number here as a heuristic, describing the mental limit we each have to stay in top of what others are working on. With traditional means of engaging in collaborative work, the Metcalfe’s Law advantages of information diversity are limited by our Dunbar’s Number ability to keep up with the new connections.

This graph describes the issue, and SMBs’ opportunity:

Up to a certain point, employees can stay on top of what their colleagues are working on, and interact relatively easily. Is this up to 150 employees? Maybe. As Danah Boyd noted about Dunbar’s Number:

He found that the MAXIMUM number of people that a person could keep up with socially at any given time, gossip maintenance, was 150. This doesn’t mean that people don’t have 150 people in their social network, but that they only keep tabs on 150 people max at any given point.

150 is a maximum number. Meaning for many of us it’s less. And I’d argue, in a work context, where we’re busy delivering on the daily tasks that define our jobs, it’s an even lower theoretical maximum.

Which means at some point, small businesses begin to lose out on those information advantages when they rely only on traditional collaborative work modes. In the graph above, that’s the part of the graph where Dunbar’s Number crosses over Metcalfe’s Law.

Call it the Metcalfe’s Law Opportunity Gap.

At that point, companies need to look at systems that allow employees to share and filter information, and to interact with others outside their daily sphere of contacts. To access non-redundant information and points of view.

This is a problem well-known to large organizations. It also applies to SMBs as well. It’s why they need social software at a certain point in their growth trajectory.

This is an important issue for innovation. So many of these employees will have front line customer and supplier experience, and ideas for the business. But visibility on these ideas will get harder and harder as the firm grows.

If this area interests you, check out WE by Spigit. Social software for SMBs.

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My Ten Favorite Tweets – Week Ending 010810

January 9, 2010 1 Comment

From the home office in Sacramento, where Governor Schwarzenegger laid out an initial budget that will take 11 months to resolve and pass…go ahead and get your California jokes ready now…

#1: If this topic interests you – Designing for Innovation through Competitive Collaboration – I ask for your #e2conf vote http://bit.ly/8xuQuC

#2: The Wisdom of Crowds Like Me http://bit.ly/4WM1Bi #crowdsourcing

#3: How Do Product Managers Reject Bad Ideas? http://bit.ly/7j6Ax0 by @chriscummings01 #innovation

#4: Jessica Hagy: The Visual Grammar of Ideas :: Articles :: The 99 Percent #innovation http://post.ly/HcJL

#5: Should you be thinking about Enterprise 2.0 in 2010? http://cli.gs/th9me by @dahowlett > A rare, rare bit of optimism there #e20

#6: MITRE’s intranet, including its Spigit deployment, is named to Jakob Nielsen’s Top 10 Intranets for 2010: http://bit.ly/5jrgJY #e20

#7: RT @dhinchcliffe The K-factor Lesson: How Social Ecosystems Grow (Or Not) http://bit.ly/8aEQEQ

#8: RT @paujoral Great quote by @wimrampen: “the name of the (social networking) game is how to participate in knowledge flows”

#9: Just had to use the “Let Me Google That for You” site for a colleague: http://lmgtfy.com/

#10: This is both funny and so true: Effect of Bay Area earthquakes on Twitter traffic http://twitpic.com/x3c10 (h/t @louisgray)

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My Ten Favorite Tweets – Week Ending 010110

January 3, 2010 Leave a comment

From the home office in the future, where I’m currently reviewing all these 2010 predictions with a skeptical eye…

#1: How Companies Increase Innovation – WSJ.com #innovation http://post.ly/GubP

#2: RT @chuckfrey Amazon’s Jeff Bezos on two ways to approach customer-focused innovation: http://ow.ly/QIbl #innovation #strategy

#3: RT @briansolis Ideas Connect Us More than Relationships (video interview) http://bit.ly/8wPTzf

#4: Outstanding, detailed post on Enterprise 2.0 adoption from @ITSinsider & the @20adoption council: http://bit.ly/516Cv4 #e20

#5: Designing For Social Traction by Joshua Porter #design http://post.ly/GoE6

#6: Intellipedia anyone? “Preventing the Terrorist Attack: Massive Failure in Collaboration” http://bit.ly/6AQgPV #e20 #gov20

#7: 2010 Predictions from @jkuramot of Oracle AppsLab: http://bit.ly/7ainDr “Reputation will be all the rage in 2010.” > Agree

#8: RT @matthewemay Six years ago this USAToday essay by Jim Collins changed my entire view of the world. http://is.gd/5HPPu

#9: RT @davewiner: Anil Dash, an upper-caste Twitterer, explains to low-life scum like you and I, what it’s like up there. :-) http://r2.ly/yxbt

#10: My 5 1/2 y.o. son on why he didn’t see a friend’s kindergarten girl from the sister school in his coed class: “All the girls look alike.”

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Three Enterprise 2.0 Themes You Should Be Watching in 2010

December 31, 2009 24 Comments

Enterprise 2.0 continued its growth and maturation in 2009. We saw the rise of the Enterprise 2.0 consultancies, including Dachis Group, Altimeter Group and Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0. Andrew McAfee published his book about Enterprise 2.0. We saw the rise of the 2.0 Adoption Council. And based on what can be gleaned from vendors, more enterprises are deploying social software.

For 2010, three themes will impact the sector. These aren’t the only ones, but I expect to see plenty of news, features and industry mental energy covering these.

#1: Impact of SharePoint 2010

It’s coming. SharePoint 2010. Microsoft’s upcoming release for the enterprise received good attention during the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas. Features include:

  • Social profiles
  • An actual wiki
  • Blogs
  • Activity streams
  • Status updates
  • Presence status
  • Social bookmarking
  • Tags
  • Ratings

As a list of capabilities, this certainly is impressive and quite a departure from SharePoint 2007′s social software efforts. The devil is in the details, of course.

But generally, customers who have been “making do” with 2007 will suddenly have an attractive option from Microsoft. SharePoint 2010 will likely be a big catalyst for Enterprise 2.0 growth.

The coming release of SharePoint 2010 is forcing many vendors to evaluate their positions in the market. Going head-to-head with the same or fewer features is going to be tough. What differentiates your offering? My Jaws picture refers to this dynamic facing Enterprise 2.0 vendors.

There will be articles reviewing 2010. There will be blog posts dismissing its capabilities or lack thereof. But there will be impact in the corporate world.

#2: Enterprise 2.0 Becomes “Like Air”

At Defrag 2008, I caught Charlene Li’s presentation, where she said, “social networks will be like air“. The premise of her talk is that social network aspects will become less a destination URL and more an integrated part of experience throughout the web and mobile.

We’re seeing signs of a similar shift in the enterprise. Enterprise 2.0 is becoming less a destination and many of its concepts are being integrated into non-social software apps. Salesforce’s Chatter and Tibco’s Tibbr were end-of-year examples of this. As Dana Gardner writes on Seeking Alpha:

This is a clear sign that the enterprise software and social software worlds are munging. Get ready to see a lot more.

Salesforce and Tibco won’t be the last. Expect more announcements in this vein for 2010. Mike Gotta noted that this concept was called “contextual collaboration”, and was promoted by Matt Cain in the late 1990s. The web 2.0 tools of today are better, more diverse, more scalable and better adapted to human behaviors than whatever was available a decade ago.

Putting these tools in-the-flow will be a powerful basis for expanding Enterprise 2.0’s reach. A challenge for standalone general tools of today is that they require employees to toggle between different apps. This can make it tough to get traction. For example, Intellipedia has been making a difference, but it’s still just “a marginal revolution“. Not all agencies have made it part of daily work.

In the European Oracle Enterprise 2.0 Group on LinkedIn, Oracle’s VP of Enterprise 2.0 for EMEA asked this question:

What the article doesn’t cover and where I would be interested in your views is how the use of E2.0 tools would enable the Business Processes themselves to be changed. Or innovated completely. eg how do you bring Crowdsourcing, Idea Engines, Prediction Markets etc and integrate those into ERP systems?

Yes, even Oracle is discussing this concept. Watch how this theme unfolds in 2010.

#3: Enterprise 2.0 Market Stratifies

I see the Enterprise 2.0 market splitting into these two models:

  1. General collaboration suites that replace intranets and portals
  2. Specialized applications that deliver tangible value around a specific activity

Watching the progression of general collaboration suite vendors, I’ve always believed their ultimate goal is to replace existing 1.0 intranets and portals. After all, once an Enterprise 2.0 vendor’s solution…

  • has the ability to store and organize files,
  • provides pages for company-wide and team-specific communications,
  • offers powerful search capabilities,
  • includes APIs for third party integration,
  • can be organized into multiple spaces, and
  • has a superset of the elements of the corporate directory,

…why would a company maintain both the intranet and the social software suite. Pick one. The Enterprise 2.0 vendors still need to mature their product further to become the company intranet/portal. But I see that as their destination.

Meanwhile, a new crop of vendors have dispensed with the pursuit of all-everything suite approach. Rather, they build applications that integrate social in solving specific problems (e.g. Spigit for innovation management). Gartner analyst Anthony Bradley tabs these vendors’ offerings as “activity-specific social applications”. These vendors build in functionality that solves specific problems for companies, usually with definable ROI.

I expect the general collaboration suite vendors will offer their own specialized modules as well, in order to offer tangible ROI solutions to their customers.

Watch how this stratification dynamic plays out in 2010.

Those are my thoughts – what do you think?

What the article doesn’t cover and where I would be interested in your views is how the use of E2.0 tools would enable the Business Processes themselves to be changed. Or innovated completely. eg how do you bring Crowdsourcing, Idea Engines, Prediction Markets etc and integrate those into ERP systems?

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My Ten Favorite Tweets – Week Ending 121809

December 19, 2009 1 Comment

From the home office in Washington D.C., where I’m racing home from the global warming summit in Copenhagen to beat the icy cold snow storm…

#1: I’m on @paidcontent this week, discussing the ranking & presentation of tweets in search engines: http://bit.ly/6vcIGj

#2: If You Can’t Innovate Across Silos, Don’t Expect To Succeed w/ Open Innovation http://bit.ly/8GPtIp by @lindegaard #e20 #innovation

#3: RT @sengseng Must read by @CliveThompson in @Wired about the power & benefits of daydreaming & the idle mind: http://j.mp/1cz6n4

#4: RT @dhinchcliffe: Collaborative Innovation through Social Competition: http://bit.ly/57tUdi #innovation #e20 #communities

#5: . @tdavidson Some people just have a knack for “seeing” the good/bad and potential of ideas. Quite valuable. #innovation

#6: How Communities Support Innovative Activities (MIT Sloan) http://post.ly/FBiq

#7: RT @webtechman Enterprise 2.0: The Top Five Faces of 2009 http://bit.ly/7a2dlK #e20 > thanks Daniel, I’m a bush among redwoods there

#8: Thanks @tristanwalker – glad you like the #foursquare as social CRM post. Small business payments/CRM market is ripe for disruption.

#9: RT @Armano: 50 beautiful (and free) icon sets for your next web design http://om.ly/dDED /via @GuyKawasaki

#10: When you’re ready for some holiday cheer, Last.fm music tagged ‘Christmas’ http://bit.ly/5RJSwY

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My Ten Favorite Tweets – Week Ending 121109

December 12, 2009 1 Comment

From the home office in San Francisco where I’ll be taking an indefinite break from golf…

#1: On top of Chatter, Salesforce buys GroupSwim http://bit.ly/8KxLGe (by @benkepes) Ever, ever deeper into #e20

#2: Check out: Enterprise 2.0 – Someone Has To Sell This Shit http://bit.ly/5XypZV #e2conf > funniest title so far #e20

#3: So very interesting: Let’s talk about chickens and e2.0 http://bit.ly/7xyDNj by @merigruber “Teams” of star performers are less productive

#4: Intellipedia suffers midlife crisis — Government Computer News > Still “just a marginal revolution” #e20 http://post.ly/EDLK

#5: Social networking is the creation of relationships, collaboration and knowledge around social objects. [credit to @gapingvoid here]

#6: What will power next-generation businesses? http://bit.ly/8TAGkI by @dhinchcliffe #community #crowdsourcing #e20 #innovation

#7: Three Secret Weapons Of Innovation: Sensemaking, Weak Signals Reading And Futuretyping. Which One Of Them Do You Cur… http://post.ly/EfDV

#8: Organizations’ Innovation Dark Energy – Employee Motivations (via Spigit blog) http://bit.ly/7XAwk6 #innovation

#9: RT @johntodor Here’s my take on Hutch Carpenter’s Four Quadrants of Innovation. http://bit.ly/BUX8u #innovation

#10: Thanks @guykawasaki for picking up my Four Quadrants of Innovation blog post: http://bit.ly/6HsXE1 @innovate #innovation

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My Ten Favorite Tweets – Week Ending 120409

December 6, 2009 Leave a comment

From the home office in the middle of the road by my smashed up SUV with a nine-iron imprint on my face…

#1: RT @parkerlsmith Foursquare: Democratizing the Loyalty Program http://post.ly/Dpfx > SMBs can use @fourquare as a loyalty program

#2: FT.com – We’re all selling now: the evolution of online reputations http://ow.ly/Izba #socialmedia #e20 #reputation

#3: What can email interfaces learn from Twitter clients (e.g. Tweetdeck) to manage the overload? http://post.ly/Dlww

#4: Collaboration Is Hot: Why Now? > Forrester survey shows idea mgt tools are a top 2 #e20 priority http://post.ly/DuBB

#5: IT@Intel Blog: All I Want For Christmas is my #E20 > ideation was the one measurable ROI #innovation http://post.ly/E8Nt

#6: Fox: Cisco has a product ideas wiki for employees. Dedicated VC funding for ideas. Similar to what AT&T is doing w/ Spigit. #ois09

#7: Lasher: Innovation lever = do small thing w/ big result. Avoid going right for big bang. Otherwise corp antibodies kill you #ois09

#8: McKinney: 60% of ideas generated internally. Via HP Garage. Use employee crowdsourcing to filter and refine these. #ois09

#9: RT @AndreaMeyer: HP Labs saved $2 bln $ from its supply chain through internal innovations #ois09

#10: Just started a posterous account: http://bhc3.posterous.com/ Collect stuff I find along the way. FriendFeed meets Evernote meets blogging.

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My Ten Favorite Tweets – Week Ending 111909

November 21, 2009 Leave a comment

From the home office in the restarted Cern Large Hadron Collider along the French-Swiss border…

#1: What Shaun White & Snowboarding Can Teach You About #Innovation http://ow.ly/E8h7 Get exposure for ideas early, so others can digest impact

#2: Managing Employee Innovation Communities (via Spigit blog) http://bit.ly/3SREBr #innovation #e20

#3: City of Manor’s “citizens’ innovation” project (using Spigit) is featured on WhiteHouse.gov blog: http://ow.ly/DURl #gov20

#4: RT @CarolineDangson #IDC Social Survey: workers say they use IM for ‘collaboration’ & social networks for ‘sharing’ – thinking about diff

#5: RT @rotkapchen: RT @wimrampen Social Media Disrupts Decision-Making Process http://bit.ly/2KTUIz (via @GrahamHill)

#6:  RT @tjkeitt Starting the process of researching #e2.0 technology pushed into business processes (CRM, ERP, project management, etc.). This is the future.

#7: RT @kevinmarks says @Caterina “Google never got social software – Knol means you have to write a whole article; wikipedia combines tiny contributions” #w2e

#8: Pitching Sequoia? They want to know which deadly sin your company lets customers indulge in http://ow.ly/DGn1 by @glennkelman

#9: Checking out: The Awesomeness Manifesto http://ow.ly/DmID by @umairh Much to love in that one #innovation

#10: Time Magazine is apparently torn between naming Twitter or the Economy as its “Person” of the Year http://ow.ly/CRbB

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Early Peek at Speaker Submissions for Enterprise 2.0 Boston 2010

November 19, 2009 1 Comment

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference Boston Call for Papers has been open for a little over a week now. While the final number of speaker proposals will number in the hundreds (450+ for SF 2009), the initial 29 submissions are a rich vein of current thinking about Enterprise 2.0.

As you can see in the tag cloud from the site, the top tags so far for the proposed sessions are:

  1. technology adoption
  2. social media
  3. best practices
  4. knowledge management
  5. getting started
  6. learning
  7. business case

Technology is the top tag. There’s no denying that technology enables Enterprise 2.0. Adoption is running strong so far. Which is a pretty fair characterization of a key issue in the field. Social media comes on strong. There are plenty of conferences devoted to that topic, and here even a conference primarily addressing to internal collaboration has its share.

A Few of the Proposals

Based on page views, here are the five most popular submissions early on:

Three Keys to a Successful SharePoint Deployment (Rich Blank):

There are 3 keys to deploying SharePoint successfully for a large enterprise: Platform, Governance, and Marketing. The first part involves a stable, available, easily accessible, secure, well performing global technology platform. If users can’t access the environment, they won’t trust it or won’t use it. Next is governance – all things related to the overall project as well as the operational and support involved. Finally there is marketing — you need to market the application to end users, provide quick introductions to get them started, best practices, conduct demos that demonstrate business value, create proof of concepts, and show people what’s possible. You shouldn’t have to provide formal training if you market the application right. Each of these 3 are not mutually exclusive — you can’t have marketing without the platform and good governance.

Driving Adoption is anti-2.0 (Paula Thornton):

There’s way too much 1.0-thinking being applied to the 2.0 era. “Driving adoption” is the antithesis of the fundamental premises of 2.0. Starting with 2.0 axioms is critical to guide any 2.0 initiative.

Connecting the Dots to Competitive Advantage (Jon Ingham):

Enterprise 2.0 can increase efficiencies and help meet business objectives but it can also generate competitive advantage.  To create higher levels of value, the use of social technologies needs to be linked to other organizational enablers, eg HR practices, OD interventions, facilities design etc.  This session will show how.

Lessons from Religion about Evangelizing Enterprise 2.0 (Gil Yehuda):

The E2.0 marketplace has evangelists, non-believers, and faith-based ROI models. But the workplace is modeled after the hierarchy of government and the meritocracy of the marketplace. Wherein lies community? As it turns out, religion can teach us about the nature of community in context of preparing the workplace for E2.0.

Moving Beyond Email — Barriers to Knowledge Management (James Rosen):

Email is fast, free, and easy to use, but it has many limitations, especially in an enterprise context. Yet many employees, especially baby-boomers, rely on it nearly exclusively. This talk examines the use cases for which email is the wrong tool, and how to move to better ones.

That’s just a few of them, check ‘em all out. And be ready to vote come January 2010.

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Social Software 2.0: Enterprise Process Ubiquity

November 16, 2009 10 Comments

In the beginning, there were forums, blogs and wikis. And it was good.

In talking with people about the Enterprise 2.0 industry, I like to insert yet another versioning number scheme:

  • Social Software 1.0
  • Social Software 2.0

Social Software 1.0 was the era of actually creating these open, collaborative applications. The approach of these tools was groundbreaking. Apps for managing knowledge that are open, persistent, easy to create and accepting  contributions from many? This was groundbreaking. The tools of Social Software 1.0 are: blogs, wikis, forums, microblogging, activity streams, tags, social connections.

Social Software 1.0 is the “Tools Era”. Put these collaboration and information sharing tools in place, then let the benefits flow. And the benefits do flow.

But are they flowing fast enough? Will they assume core operational infrastructure status within enterprises? This is the crux of Dennis Howlett’s post, Enterprise 2.0 – the non-debate. It’s a fair question. Dennis notes this in his post:

I’ve also argued that I’ve never heard anyone ask for some Enterprise 2.0 though I’ve heard plenty ask for ERP, CRM etc.

Let’s examine that particular quote for a moment, on two fronts. First is the important point that CRM, ERP and other existing enterprise software address core company activities. Sales? No sales, no company. ERP? You can apply a thousand clerical workers for all the little things needed to manage resources, or organize information systematically to great benefit.

Second is the fact that markets demand these apps. Let’s take a ride in the time machine back to 2001. In the article, CRM Adoption Continues at an Aggressive Pace, this market growth was noted:

Spending on customer relationship management (CRM) applications will grow to $10.4 billion by the end of 2001, a 167 percent increase from the $3.9 billion spent in 2000, according to a report by eMarketer.

An industry on fire, with sales in the billions, that was started sometime in the mid-1990s, and Siebel Systems was started in 1993. So in the course of just a few years, CRM was a bona fide hit inside businesses. Enterprise 2.0 is at an earlier stage in its industry life cycle, but isn’t currently on track to be the size of the CRM market in the next few years.

This isn’t to say Enterprise 2.0 isn’t finding its footing with its tools focus. As Dion Hinchcliffe writes, there has been a significant pickup in corporations’ implementation of these applications: “Just as importantly, we are also starting to see customers implementing Enterprise 2.0 in scale. These typically include enterprise social networking, wikis, and social CRM.”

Look closely at the three types of implementations: wikis, social networking, and social CRM.

Social CRM?

That’s not part of the Social Software 1.0 canon. Rather social CRM is an example of the next generation of social software. Social Software 2.0.

Social Software 2.0: Addressing Existing Enterprise Workflows

Here’s how I define Social Software 2.0:

The integration of collaboration, increased findability, social networking and crowdsourcing into core enterprise activities requiring defined workflows, specific user sign-offs, results measurement and role-based access.

I’ll admit that comes across as a tall order. But it’s a worthy goal. Check out Ray Wang’s ten elements that define the next generation of enterprise business software solutions for a deeper look at these requirements.

The challenge is figuring out where social benefits traditional processes and systems. In Susan Scrupski’s great presentation, Enterprise 2.0 Demystified, there’s this slide:

Susan Scrupski - E2.0 Demystified

Credit: Susan Scrupski, SoCo Partners

There’s an aspirational component to the graphic. “Social ERP” includes a number of nuts-n-bolts activities that all of us can understand: order tracking, purchase orders, inventory management.

What we don’t yet understand is how social gets in there and improves these processes. But Nenshad Bardoliwalla starts us down that path in his post, Is Enterprise 2.0 a Savior or a Charlatan? In the graphic below, he fills in the white spaces of process flows with instances of social software applications (+ email/IM):

Nenshad - social software fills in process white spaces

The graphic starts to describe the way social software could integrate into existing activities of organizations. But it still leaves some questions. For instance, see that wiki in the Contact Center row, to the right of Campaign Management? It’s linked below to the Sales and Quotation Analysis process.

In Social Software 1.0, that’s a standalone wiki. I’m a fan of the notion that collaboration needs to occur in-the-flow of work. And having a separate wiki for collaborating on a customer quotation analysis makes it tougher to get usage.

In Social Software 2.0, that’s a collaborative space integrated into a sales force automation application. The customer quotation analysis occurs right where all the “action” occurs in the effort to win new business.

Some Examples of Social Software 2.0

With the luxury of a blank blog page, I’ve got the freedom to suggest a few examples where collaboration and crowdsourcing can be more integrated directly into corporate activities.

B2B Sales: The process of pulling together a proposal in the B2B market generally requires involvement of several parties. This is a process screaming for collaboration, visibility, searchability and persistence. It also has deadlines, and sign-offs by executives. Generally, tapping an existing database of customer information is required too. Embedding a wiki-like experience in CRM, along with the deep database access and project dimensions would be valuable.

Procurement: Enterprises buy mountains of things. Inevitably, some of it doesn’t work out as well as expected. As employees order and request items, allow them to rate and comment on existing contracts. By sharing their experiences, employees provide procurement managers with insight into the quality of suppliers. And employees can describe evolving needs. The workflow aspect of this occurs when the crowdsourced rating falls below some threshold, triggering a required review by the procurement manager.

Product Management: If you’ve ever done product management, you know that you’ll receive plenty of individual ideas on what’s needed. Business units, sales, marketing, engineering, customer service…all have strong opinions on what should be included. Putting all these internal constituencies together on a common platform to identify ideas and get crowdsourced input on the most pressing features would be a tremendously helpful. The process would need to include analytics to filter through them, and workflow to flesh out features and get sign-offs. Example: Spigit innovation management.

There are myriad corporate systems and processes where some elements of social can be leveraged to improve operations.

Sameer Patel, in his post Why Process Barfs on Social, includes this tweet by (now former) SAP EVP Zia Yusuf:

@dahowlett blog and wikis will not drive value alone, I think the trick here is to connect “crowd insight” directly into specific bizprocess

And Helpstream CEO Bob Warfield adds this thought:

What we’re lacking is simply a harmonious marriage of these two.  Social should be integrated into specific business processes, perhaps many if not most specific business processes.

What we’re seeing is the natural maturation of an industry. Tools were needed to establish the Enterprise 2.0 field in the first place. Now it’s time to apply these tools, and social computing concepts, to the mainstay activities that drive businesses.

What Form Will Social Software 2.0 Take?

The maturation of the social software industry beyond tools to deeper integration into existing business processes will have parallel development paths:

  • Established enterprise applications will add social elements to their offerings
  • General purpose collaboration and social network providers will develop features addressing specific types of traditional activities
  • Social software platforms focused on delivering value in a specific core business activity

Like most enterprise software markets, there will be room for all three types of offerings. I think it will be hard to dislodge best-of-breed for the biggest systems: ERP and CRM. Those vendors will add social elements as time allows, and nimble small companies will offer plug-ins that supplement their offerings. Most other systems in the enterprise will be up for grabs if there’s a better way.

I’ll close with another quote from Bob Warfield with regard to how the Social Software 2.0 landscape will play out:

No touchy feely stuff allowed.  You can’t just be about making things “better” or “empowering people.”  Passion is great, but call your shot, and if the ball doesn’t go into that pocket, you’ve scratched and forfeit the game.

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