Enterprise 2.0

There’s a new review of Enterprise 2.0 in town - this time from Pleon’s Daniel Penton, writing for Simply Communicate who also interviewed me last month.

Daniel’s review is practical and down to earth, a point made clear from the title “Web 2.0 made simple”. He highlights both the Oracle and Janssen-Cilag case studies that feature in the book as examples that “make a very compelling argument for Enterprise 2.0.”

He also singles out the 4Cs Approach that runs through the book, labeling it as “a practical action-led guide to employing social software within organisations.”

I was particularly interested to see Daniel picking up on the increasing friction between business and IT departments that will result as companies try to introduce these tools:

As a result, an initiative often falls over when it gets to the IT department, who are more concerned with maintaining current infrastructure than experimenting with new unproven technologies. This is one of the major challenges of widespread adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise.

He concludes that the book is “a great way to educate people new to the subject while enabling those who are already experienced in the area” and “shows how easy it can (and should) be to start experimenting with Web 2.0 technologies in the workplace.”

Who am I to argue with that?

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With the first reviews of Enterprise 2.0 coming in thick and fast, I thought it would be worth highlighting and commenting on them here. I promise I won’t limit it to just positive reviews - I’m more than happy to respond to any criticism as well (although I obviously hope that will be few and far between).

First up is a review from Roy Johnson, who maintains the excellent Mantex website which is full of excellent resources.

He summarises the book well, explaining that its purpose is to show how the techniques and concepts behind Web 2.0 application can be used to encourage collaboration efforts in secretive, competitive businesses. He comments that to succeed in modern business, managers and directors “must learn to listen and talk to their customers and staff”, be “more agile in their thinking”, “less monolithic in their practices”, and “catch up to new Internet-based activities which can sweep away unwary traditionalists overnight”.

There is one criticism though:

In fact he misses the opportunity to point out that one of the biggest incentives for companies to embrace Web 2.0 software is that much of it is completely free. Almost all major programs are now available in Open Source versions - including such fundamentals as operating systems (Linux) content management systems (Joomla) and virtual learning environments (Moodle).

In the UK, government institutions have invested and wasted billions of pounds after being bamboozled by software vendors. In the education sector alone, VLEs such as Blackboard and WebCT have proved costly mistakes for many colleges and universities. They are now locked in to proprietory systems, whilst OSS programs such as Moodle run rings round them - and are free.

It’s a good point well made. I certainly wasn’t explicit about this. I tend to find that the fact that software is open source or free (which aren’t the same thing) doesn’t make it good. It’s certainly not one of the criteria for success. Sure, it can be an incentive, but my guess is that most businesses would prefer well supported, paid for software that will meet their needs than open source, free software that might not.

Summing up, Roy says:

This is a truly inspirational book which should be required reading for managers, IT leaders, systems analysts, developers, and business strategists in any enterprise, small, medium, and especially large.

I encourage you to read his full review to draw your own conclusions.

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I avoid bouts of ego-stroking wherever I can, as it’s one of the things that annoys me about this most social of media.

So on this occasion, I hope you’ll forgive me (Marc Wright would probably appreciate the traffic). His internal communications magazine, simply-communicate.com recently profiled me as part of its “How Did I Get Here?” series, joining such luminaries as Euan Semple, Steve Rubel, John Smythe, Mark Ragan, Shel Holtz, Steve Crescenzo, Neville Hobson and my soon to be ex-colleague David Ferrabee.

You can read the piece here.

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My core thesis in Enterprise 2.0 is that social software will change the future of work.

So in an otherwise underwhelming update of McKinsey’s global survey on the state of web 2.0 in companies, I was therefore intrigued by the finding that companies satisfied with their use of web 2.0 “are not only using more technologies but also leveraging them to change management practices and organizational structures.”

Here are some of the data points that appear to back that up:

• 38% of respondents said that their company’s use of web 2.0 technologies and tools has changed the way they communicate with customers and suppliers;
• 16% said it has changed the way they hire and retain talent;
• The same number said it has created major new roles or functions in their organization;
• 14% said it has changed the way their organization is structured.

Before we get too carried away, it’s worth noting that 36% of respondents said that it hadn’t changed the way the company is managed and organized at all, although when you break that down only 8% of those who report the highest satisfaction levels with their use of web 2.0 believe that to be the case.

For me, the report is still too lightweight for a heavyweight organization like McKinsey. Maybe there’s a lot more data or analysis that they’re not making public. If so, that’s a shame because businesses need as much as they can get at the moment. If not, then they need to look at some of their more pedestrian survey questions for next year and go much, much deeper.

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Last week I covered the third category in my approach to planning Enterprise 2.0. The fourth and final category is connection.

Day Four: Connection

With social software, interaction is distributed over time, between multiple individuals and even across different systems. The tools that make connections between and within people and content are therefore critical in bringing together the other three Cs - namely communication, cooperation and collaboration.

In Enterprise 2.0, I introduce five social computing technologies that can provide these connections.

Social networking

Social networking between friends needs no introduction. In the enterprise it can be valuable when the organization rewards individual effort but perhaps needs to encourage more knowledge sharing across geographical or functional boundaries. Internal applications of social networking that mix both personal and professional interests are more likely to succeed.

Tagging

Tagging and syndication (see below) are possibly the only two technologies that are used on a widespread basis throughout all social software, to make information easier to search, discover and navigate. Tagging is the cornerstone of creating user-generated taxonomies (or folksonomies) that help people connect with information using social software and aggregate information from disparate sources into one subject-related place.

The debates rumbles on over whether folksonomies are better than formal classification systems, but Forrester Research have outlined some of the reasons the latter no longer works:

• Content creators lack time and incentives;
• Professional taxonomists are hard to justify;
• Metadata authoring tools are awkward;
• Software automation has not reached its full potential.

I recommend a hybrid approach, a combination of taxonomy and folksonomy. A ‘talksonomy’ perhaps?

Search (and social search)

Study after study shows that when it comes to searching enterprise content, employees’ expectations are not being met. The algorithmic approaches they use rely too much on the author of a piece of information to determine the search terms under which it should be found. Enterprises also have smaller corpuses of content to be searched so it is harder to aggregate the data needed to determine relevance. Nor do intranet authors have the incentives of their Internet counterparts to index their content or use links as an ad hoc voting mechanism.

Social search takes a different approach to the problem, relying on human beings to select the content that is important and index it using keywords that mean something to them. By tapping into the collective intelligence of a large group of people, social search engines build a universe of content that has gone through a process of selection, but has also been tagged.

Syndication

Syndication is the only realistic way left to filter all the information and interaction ‘noise’ that social software generates. RSS is the format that has risen to the top of the pile and is now commonplace in all forms of social software.

In the enterprise RSS has many uses, including:

• Internal communication;
• Information aggregation and syndication;
• Enterprise 2.0 collaboration.

Mashups

Increasingly, companies will want to combine many of the outputs from social software systems with existing enterprise applications and even external services. Application programming interfaces (APIs) make this a relatively quick and painless process. The result is something called a mashup - a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.

Summary

That concludes my introduction to the 4Cs approach to enterprise social software planning. I hope you found it useful. There is, of course, much more detail in the book - and no doubt I’ll revisit some of the themes again in future posts.

I’d love to know if you find this approach useful - or otherwise.

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