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Enterprise 2.0: What do we know today about moving our organizations into the 21st century?
Assessing the Enterprise 2.0 marketplace in 2009: Robust and crowded
A wide range of software providers now proclaim that they make Enterprise 2.0 tools, or have adapted/extended what they make today in order to address this space in some way. This includes the full gamut of open source projects, commercial vendors, startups, and established Web firms such as Google.
In fact, during the course of the survey work, it sometimes seemed like every company making business-oriented collaboration and communication tools is now offering Enterprise 2.0 capabilities in some form. Overall this is a good sign for customers (because supply is most likely greater than demand) and though all new markets tend to shake out, we are no longer in early days with social software. This means that the majority of these products will likely be around for the medium to long-term. It also means that there is probably something available that will fit your specific choice of features, price, technology needs, standards support, and other requirements.
It’s important to note that these are very different applications in terms of scale and purpose. So though they might even be used side-by-side in some organizations, a smart enterprise social computing strategy will spend time selecting the right tools for the job depending on exactly what’s needed by the business. In other words, these applications aren’t all interchangeable, but form a general class of applications that can improve collaboration, knowledge management, expertise location, leverage of corporate data, and so on.
14 Reasons Why Enterprise 2.0 Projects Fail
It’s a classic adage that we usually learn more from our failures than from our successes. I’ve find this line of reasoning with Enterprise 2.0 failures to be fascinating because of how very different it’s often turning out to be from traditional IT projects.
For one, IT doesn’t seem to be in the driver’s seat nearly as much with Enterprise 2.0. In fact, the initiative is frequently coming from the business side. Two, as the latest case studies emerge and are analyzed, it is grassroots efforts that often end up being the most successful, bubbling up and then across the organization, only then to be formally adopted later. And three, many so-called Enterprise 2.0 projects are local, unblessed, informal uses of social computing software which — by their very nature — are less compliant with enterprise technology standards, legal/HR guidelines, and corporate policy.
The point here is that many Enterprise 2.0 tools are often used widely in organizations without tacit approval.
* It starts strong in a single department and then never makes it out.
* Selecting the tools first
* Selecting the wrong tools and sticking with them
* There are no resources allocated to adoption and training
* It’s purely an IT initiative
* The effort excludes IT
* Engaging with HR, legal, branding, compliance, etc. too soon
* Pushing Enterprise 2.0 as a generic toolbox instead of the solution to specific problems
* Lack of effective executive champions
* Lack of effective participants: Empty blogs, wikis, or silent social networks
* No long term plan or budget for governance, community management, upgrades, or maintenance
* Failure to draw in key influencers as adoption broadens
* Building it all as a self-contained, top-down effort
* Not waiting long enough to let critical mass build
Enterprise 2.0 is unique, however, in the respect that there is virtually no technology risk but there is much higher risk when it comes to people and organizational issues. Social computing in the enterprise is most successful when there is a healthy commu
The year of the shift to Enterprise 2.0
As depicted in the figure above, which lays out the spectrum of most enterprise knowledge creation and flow today, important new channels have been added to the corporate mix in recent years. Channels that are just starting to be used. Blogs, wikis, and activity streams (those event lists in apps like Facebook and Twitter that tell you what’s happening in near real-time) in particular are changing how knowledge workers express themselves and work with each other. The intrinsic design of these tools creates much more of a usable, accessible information ecosystem than traditional tools. These traditional tools can create powerful, local information flows but little build-up of value over time or collective intelligence. In other words, the new social tools change enterprise knowledge flow by making it more social, more open and public, discoverable, and ultimately, the most leverageable.
Note: I somewhat reluctantly included ECM in this list since the latest crop of ECM tools are adding much of the emergent, freeform, and social aspect that makes Enterprise 2.0 apps so distinct, powerful, and engaging. Just be warned that most off-the-shelf ECM today is not going to enable Enterprise 2.0 outcomes.
Sharepoint and Enterprise 2.0: The good, the bad, and the ugly | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com
The state of Enterprise 2.0
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However, increasing evidence abounds that Enterprise 2.0 adoption has begun in earnest with a typical example being Wells Fargo taking the plunge,
having rolled out Enterprise 2.0 platforms to 160,000 workers. It has
become clear that we’re moving out of the early pioneer phase to a
broader acceptance phase. From the production side, a brand new analysis
indicates that the business social software market will be nearly $1
billion strong this year and over $3.3 billion by 2011. In these and
other ways, such as the growing collection of success stories, Enterprise 2.0 has arrived.The big question for many of those on the fence now is: 1) Do we now
have the right capabilities in terms of ready Enterprise 2.0 products?
And 2) Do we generally understand how to apply them properly to obtain
good returns on our investment in them? Knowing the answers to both
questions will almost certainly tell us if we’re ready for mainstream
adoption of adoption of Enterprise 2.0 any time soon.Did the original articulation of Enterprise 2.0 have the right focus
and point us in the best direction? And has the conception of it
evolved from this vision to reflect that which we’ve learned along the
way? Going back again to our two questions that will inform us as to
the state of Enterprise 2.0; what have learned from our
experiences with the early platforms and initial rollouts of Enterprise
2.0 and what does it teach us?The state of Enterprise 2.0 - Fall 2007
Here is what appears to be what we’ve learned about Enterprise 2.0 up to this point in time:
Enterprise 2.0 is going to happen in your organization with you or without you
- Effective Enterprise 2.0 seems to involve more than just blogs and wikis
- Enterprise 2.0 is more a state of mind than a product you can purchase
- Most businesses still need to educate their workers on the techniques and best practices of Enterprise 2.0 and social media
- The benefits of Enterprise 2.0 can be dramatic, but only builds steadily over time
- Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t seem to put older IT systems out of business
- Your organization will begin to change in new ways because of Enterprise 2.0. Be ready
In the meantime, I’d like to try an experiment and extend the SLATES
mnemonic a bit. My biggest issue in using it in its present form to
communicate Enterprise 2.0 is that it doesn’t itself capture the social, emergent, and freeform
aspects that we know are so essential and so I’ve added these. I know
SLATES is supposed to be capability based but it also needs to convey
the intended outcomes clearly, and social capability in particular is
missing. Thus, I’ve used an anagram generator to create another
(hopefully) pithy mnemonic, FLATNESSES, which itself captures yet
another important aspect of Enterprise 2.0, its egalitarian nature.
FLATNESSES is depicted in the diagram below containing these three key
aspects added to SLATES as well as a fourth which I discuss below. I
hope you find this a useful conception to discuss the vital elements of
Enterprise 2.0 in your efforts and would love your feedback.
- absolutesubzero on 2007-12-10
Enterprise 2.0 industry matures as businesses grapple with its potential
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In my studies of Enterprise 2.0 adoption, there are two major methods by which these new applications take hold. The first is the traditional model where the IT department or some part of the business decides at a high level to adopt these new tools and begins the process of evaluation, acquisition, deployment, training and adoption. This is the traditional model that most IT large-scale software acquisitions still use today.
The other model is where individuals take it upon themselves to find the best solutions to a given problem at hand and solve them creatively and collaboratively at a grassroots level. This is becoming increasingly more common, particularly in organizations that are less strongly hierarchical and I’ve identified this story in many large organizations, from AOL’s stunningly rapid viral adoption of MediaWiki (the open source platform that runs Wikipedia) to the story of a large utility company getting ready to roll out Enterprise 2.0 only to find that the majority of departments had already adopted a solution on their own.
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