The Work Place and Enterprise 2.0

In a few of the previous posts, the topic of businesses not adapting to Enterprise 2.0 has been a constant topic. It seems that businesses are more afraid of people using these tools wrong at work than seeing the benefits that these applications can bring. In Dion Henchcliffe’s blog, he discusses how some companies may start seeing the benefits. In an informal poll he has taken recently, employees now have differing access to these tools. As of late, employees have more access to blogs and wikis. Another trend he saw was that most young employees, probably because they are in college or at their first entry level job, have the least amount of access to these tools.

While blogs and wikis continue to show the potential to greatly improve collaboration, create higher levels of knowledge retention, and generate more reusable business information over time, it’s also probable that in attempts to access the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 platforms, these new platforms will incur some issues that IT departments and the business will have to deal with, particularly if these platforms are exposed outside the organization.

There are many downfalls to allowing employees access to systems like this such as public access to company information, some of the tools are not enterprise ready and the use of the tools for non-business purposes creates inefficiencies. However, there are benefits which Henchcliffe points out:
o Social media tends to capture more institutional knowledge that’s reusable.
o Tagging and other emergent organization methods allow business information to be organized
and cross-referenced from every point of view.
o Increased efficiency in conversations: social media scales up to mostly resource and time
friendly conversations among thousands of asynchronous participants, yet excludes those
uninterested in them, unlike e-mail distribution lists and conference calls.

Is your company willing to work out the kinks of a new system to reap the benefits?

Breaking it Down: Enterprise 2.0

When thinking about wikis, social networking software, blogosphere, and prediction markets, it can be quite difficult to understand what Enterprise 2.0 technologies are best used for different ties within the organization. For example, which social software platform of Enterprise 2.0 would be most efficient to utilize for a group of close collaborators, or in order words, people whom you have a close professional tie to? Andrew McAfee, Associate Professor at Harvard Business School, wrote about the “Bulleyes” approach and how the closeness of ties can affect what social software platform is most applicable to use in his latest blog. Guys it doesn’t get much easier than this… Enjoy!

Watcha Gonna Do, Watcha Gonna Do When Google Comes For You?

First thing this morning, I received my daily update from eWeek, and it had a great interview with Matt Glotzbach, Product Management Director for Google’s Enterprise Division. The interview covers quite a bit, from Google’s recent IMAP for Gmail announcement, its perspective on application delivery (SaaS), its product development efforts separate from the consumer side, its foray in mobile applications, and interoperability. Yeah pretty much everything and the kitchen sink.

I want to focus on one question during the interview, at one point Matt is asked directly, there's some perception that the technologies you're using in Google Enterprise are hand-me-downs from the consumer side. So, there is innovation going on in Google's enterprise business? Matt proceeds to discuss their recent acquisition:

On the acquisition front, we recently acquired Postini, and that was purely an enterprise piece. Postini's security services are not necessarily that germane to the average consumer. What we quickly did was looked across the board and said, What are the really unique and interesting things that Postini has to offer [so] that, when we put the Google technology and the Postini technology together, you really get a one-plus-one equals three capability?
Postini's capabilities include legal compliance, archiving and data retention. The integration of the Postini capabilities on top of Gmail and Google Apps for businesses was one of the primary motivations of that acquisition. The idea was being able to provide all of those facilities to a customer still in a software-as-a-service model, where you didn't have to maintain your own servers for the purpose of legal discovery and backup. There are very real policy issues that we believe we have good answers to.

Clearly Google is serious about enterprise, though when it launched its Google Apps, this wasn’t a surprise. But what has always stuck out in my head is the development process for them. On the consumer side we’ve all read story after story about how they look internally for those new and unique apps that can be incorporated or spun-off as a new business line. They’re also acquisition hungry, eagerly seeking the next major innovation that they can bring into their enterprise. But while acquisitions can lead to great products for their enterprise business, what’s happening with natural development based on client feedback.

I’ve worked with some of the big vendors out there, SAP, IBM, and Microsoft and so forth and so on. All have built a strong consulting business that is focused on understanding the needs of their clients. In some instances this is backed by great internal development teams, and where they don’t have one, they find the right development partners. But their core strength has always been their ability to look under the hood of a business, study it from the inside out and help it to determine what applications it truly needs. Now that’s not to say this is always the fastest of processes, with lead times that can even stretch for years.

I can remember when Windows 2000 Server launched. Microsoft was everywhere, meetings upon meetings with IT teams across the country, helping them to understand how it worked, how to work with it, and its value to the organization. This was critical, this was absolutely necessary to help IT leaders to work with their business leaders and push to make the necessary infrastructure changes and incorporate Windows 2000.

But at the same time that’s almost where I would want to see a Google step in and change the game, bringing that amazing development talent to quickly turn around the apps that corporate clients are looking for, and create a simpler but secure deliver infrastructure that would lead to faster implementations. But they seem to be missing that external facing outreach to develop relationships directly with corporations
It’s my lowly opinion that while Google clearly has Microsoft in its target, it’s still a long way off from unseating it. Those strong relationships with enterprises are still a major advantage.

So the question becomes, can Google develop that expertise to work directly with enterprises in order to truly understand their needs, or will Microsoft begin to shift its development processes to more quickly respond the way Google does while utilizing its corporate relationships to shape the next generation of enterprise applications? Well, its easy to play pundit, but I certainly don't have the answer, but its a question I think will become more pronounced as Google takes bolder steps with enterprise applications, and everyone else responds accordingly.

A New Day

What a week. While we haven’t blogged from the event, that’s not to say there isn’t so much going on and even making headlines. If you haven’t seen the press release or the newswire, Day’s new software project, Communiqué Advanced Collaboration (CQ AC), was introduced this week at our very own Portal, Collaboration and Content Conference. Day, who leads the way in global content management in infrastructure software, introduced this new package, abbreviated as CQ AC, which focuses on the management of Enterprise 2.0 tools. The software allows business social computing to come easier to a company by introducing a Wiki, blog, and calendar capabilities in one software package. It’s exciting to have in attendance companies who make a major announcement like this. There’s so much happening it’s hard to stop and take it all in.

Small Vendors Have an Advantage on Enterprise 2.0

Huge corporations such as IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle are being left in the dust in regards to Enterprise 2.0 applications. Smaller vendors are developing far more innovative technology with quicker release cycles. That is the main focus in Jon Brodkin’s blog on NetworkWorld. Rob Koplowitz, analyst at Forrester, has this clear-cut view on what’s happening with this race:

“Right now I’m seeing a clear preference toward smaller vendors. Generally speaking the big vendors are playing catch up and the big vendors have a deployment model that is not very attractive.”

Smaller companies offer quicker deployment, usually through SaaS. When will bigger companies begin to follow their rivals’ success strategies? Even though there is progress in the offerings these large vendors have for knowledge management, CMS, and collaboration, they often lack the ability to deploy and customize their solutions as quickly and easily as many of their clients require. These longer deployment cycles are preventing innovation in IBM, SAP, and Oracle, which may slow down their ability to deliver Enterprise 2.0 applications. Clearly, smaller vendors have the upper hand in this situation for now, but can we really count these larger vendors far behind, and who knows for how long?

Web Trend Map 2007 Version 2.0

Information Architects Japan recently released an updated version of their Web Trend Map. Modeled after the Hong Kong metro, the stops are the most visited websites on the web. The lines represent the different categories that are popular such as social sites and knowhow sites. Is it a surprise that some of the biggest sites on the metro map are ones we turn to for Web 2.0? Some of these sites are Technorati, Google, Facebook, You Tube and Wikipedia. All these tools are used on a daily basis by the public. Most employees have the knowledge to use these tools. With such sites and tools becoming so common, it seems a lost opportunity that employers incorporate such similar functionality sooner rather than later. How much more productive will employees be if they are using tools similar to what they use in their personal life? Is your company taking full advantage?

Microsoft: Ahead of the game

Microsoft recently launched the new generation of Windows Live services in 36 languages and 59 countries across the world. Wow! Folks are we finally thinking about maximizing our global collaboration efforts? Well it look like Microsoft’s new launch might serve as a stepping stone for other corporations to come in and follow suit according to Peter Galli's blog on eWeek.

Brian Hall, general manager of Microsoft's Windows Live business group sheds some light on there project:

"This is the first release that really pays off on that. It pays off with a suite of Windows applications that not only work well with Windows Live but also work with many other popular online services. You can have your AOL Mail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail—if you have POP access—all coming in to one client”

Users can share their photos from the Windows Live gallery on flickr, and they are even able post in manage their blogs in a rich way from any blog service that supports RSD (Really Simple Discovery).

Microsoft is definitely changing the face of Web 2.0 with their latest edition of Windows Live. When will we see a similar announcement from Microsoft regarding their latest offerings on Enterprise 2.0 capabilities? After all, constant updates to new technologies in Enterprise 2.0 are essential to stay on top. I will definitely stay tuned in to watch. Will you?

XM Satellite Radio: Enterprise 2.0 Example

It has been debated over whether Enterprise 2.0 can actually change the behaviors of corporations. In the Fast Foreword blog this week, Bill Ives wrote about the success XM Radio had with the implementation of the Quick Base program into the company’s operating system. Read the blog here. Has this happened at your company? How have Enterprise 2.0 applications affected the way your business runs?

What’s holding your company back?

Dr. Todd Stephens visited New York and had the opportunity to see the effects of Enterprise 2.0 in New York City businesses. One underlying problem he realized was that employees are trying to build the bridge and let their knowledge of the technology launch their businesses into the new era, but there are a few roadblocks that are obstructing the progress. It was the middle-level managers that chose to stick to what they knew and used old technology instead of new technology such as wikis and blogs. You can read Dr. Stephen’s article here. Is there something setting your company back that’s not allowing you to enter the new Enterprise 2.0 era?

The Recruiting World and Web 2.0

As we know, Web 2.0 will quickly make Enterprise 2.0 a new dynamic place where meeting and sharing information with colleagues becomes possible from everywhere in the country. So now, why not extend this to the recruiting process? Today in EWeek, Deborah Perelman wrote the article Leveraging Web 2.0 to Recruit. Many of the recruiting processes now will soon out date, as they are standard and provide very little feedback to candidates. Web 2.0 will make it easier to communicate back and forth throughout the recruitment process, as Zach Thomas states below:

"It makes the whole process a lot more transparent. It puts the community in control of the information out there, versus the traditional 'here is the position and we will tell you what it is all about,' where the candidate can't ask questions or see for themselves," Thomas said.

The potentials that social networking will bring to the recruitment world will impact those who remain on the Web 1.0 spectrum. How will this affect your business in the future?