Frederic Martin's List: Enterprise 2.0

• Enterprise 2.0 is real, and perhaps more importantly, the business benefits are real (and so are the challenges).
• 1. Enterprise 2.0 is real, and perhaps more importantly, the business benefits are real (and so are the challenges).
• Attendees heard success stories from end-user organizations including Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen Hamilton.
• Perhaps more importantly, speakers and attendees both heard plenty from other attendees on challenges related to governance, security, user acceptance, and building a business case in tough economic times.
• There are over a dozen press releases now on the E 2.0 site , almost all with a common theme of taking the capabilities of Facebook and Twitter and bringing them into the enterprise in a manner that meets requirements for security, compliance, and governance, but that also enables support for both internal and external collaboration.
• 3. Moving from hype to reality. Tying into theme #1 above, I saw a great deal of focus by companies such as Telligent and several others on actually “measuring” Enterprise 2.0 success via analytics and metrics.
• 4. Lines are blurring between social computing and unified communications.
• During our wednesday morning keynote on social networking there was much agreement that organizations need to think about collaboration holistically and look for ways to integrate planning around both synchronous and asynchronous communications and collaboration applications.
• Seeing the founder of Socialcast sitting among representatives of Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent and IBM Lotus Sametime sends a clear message that worlds are colliding, but perhaps the announcement of a fall Enterprise 2.0 co-located with VoiceCon in San Francisco in November sends an even more startling message.
• I’ve heard some suggestions that social messaging services such as Twitter could render investments in unified communications moot as people rapidly change the way they communicate - moving from voice/video/instant messaging to SMS/micro-blogging, profile tagging/wall-posting.

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• Why is Web 2.0 particularly interesting right now for the enterprise?
• Web 2.0 has always been about making the most of the intrinsic power of the network and whatever is attached to it.
• This can be people (social computing and Enterprise 2.0), low-cost dynamic Web partners (open APIs and cloud computing), the world’s largest database of information, lightweight integration (mashups and Web-style SOA), or maximizing the value of the network itself (the network effects that everyone talks about), and much more.
• These collectively represent better, more efficient, and less expensive ways to accomplish things that we previously used to do without the network’s help or with methods that didn’t take advantages of how the network works.
• Read this year’s Enterprise Web 2.0 predictions for 2009 for more perspective on this topic.
• Here are some practical ways that 2.0 approaches can help organizations grapple with the challenges of 2009.
• Note that the struggle with many of these, as with so much of Web 2.0, is that there is a major shift in control, a much higher level of transparency, and an openness that many businesses can be uncomfortable with.
• However, to organizations that are willing to overcome these largely political, cultural, and mindset challenges, significant opportunities are available for the taking, often for relatively modest investment.
• Move to lower-cost online/SaaS versions of enterprise applications.
• paying for yearly upgrades and new license fees is a major, recurring budget line item most organizations would like to eliminate now that most companies have a computer in front of every worker.
• Open source software is an option and is certainly cheaper up front, until the support costs and other factors come in.
• There are, in fact, numerous lower-cost options today for virtually any type of business software but unless it’s browser-delivered, or even better, externally hosted as SaaS, you can’t use the provider’s economies of scale to drive down the full range of costs from deployment of upgrades and technical support to hosting, backups, and management.
• In general, moving to SaaS for anything that isn’t strategic to the business is the best place to start if you’re trying out externally hosted apps for the first time.
• recent reports say that moving to a SaaS version of your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system will save the average firm 25% to 40%, a number that likely translates well to other types of business applications given the core nature of CRM to most enterprises.
• A good place to get a sense of the options for SaaS versions of traditional business applications is to look at Monolab’s excellent Office 2.0 database.
• Use Enterprise 2.0 to capture the knowledge and know-how of employees.
• Enabling open, persistent, freeform collaboration amongst far-flung workers allows vast amounts of institutional knowledge to pour out into visible places on the network where that information can then be studied, reused, and learned by others including (perhaps especially) new workers down the road.
• In the mass layoffs taking place in organizations around the world, tens of thousands of years of built up expertise and capability are walking out the door, largely untapped; the knowledge residing in inaccessible places such as e-mail accounts, file servers, meeting notes, and most devastating of all, in the minds of the departing workers.
• While blogs, wikis, and other Enterprise 2.0 tools can’t be a direct replacement for people, they allow organizations to be highly elastic in terms of headcount while resisting the erosion of vital corporate culture, knowledge, historical context, and critical methods.
• You’ll also reap the other benefits of Enterprise 2.0 reported by many adopters: higher efficiency, more transparency, better communication, and so on.
• Making your intranet a vibrant, ever growing, worker-powered, two-way social media landscape is one of the surest investments you can make in your organization.
• Strategically move IT infrastructure to the cloud.
• There are many reasons to start moving business applications and data to the cloud: Businesses have to keep latent capacity on hand to deal with high-water marks for demand, leaving a lot computing and network infrastructure lying idle and underutilized.
• The same businesses also can’t amortize the cost of purchases at nearly the scale that top-tier cloud vendors can, further driving up cost.
• conomies of scale are the name of the game in cloud computing and ready, on-demand access to them is what vendors provide, among other more run-of-the-mill benefits such as simplifying capacity planning and encouraging a more consistent enterprise architecture.
• I did some back-of-the-envelope costs calculations on moving to cloud computing in a post here last year and the results were eye-opening in terms of savings.
• The bottom line: We are a ways from moving all our enterprise computing to the cloud but it’s high time to begin the process of moving today.
• Embrace new low-cost models for production such as crowdsourcing.
• I explored this topic in detail in my recent exploration of the emergence of compelling new open business models.
• There are numerous competitive and economic reasons to move to crowdsourcing models for many aspects of modern business. These include using the vast audience of people on the network as a primary source of innovation, research, and product development as well as customer support, sales, and marketing.
• Crowdsourcing does require a certain set of skills however, that is very different from traditional corporate hierarchical command-and-control, which works well even in outsourcing relationships, but much less in a social computing environment.
• While crowdsourcing is providing increasingly impressive stories of late (see the aforementioned open business models article), it’s also clear that some organizations will be a failure with it and that primarily online firms will have the most success.
• Lower customer service costs by pro-active use of online customer communities.
• I took a look at the state of online customer communities a few months ago and things haven’t changed much.
• Reduce application development and integration time/expenditures with new platforms and techniques.
• Relational databases have been challenged by new successors such as documented-oriented databases like CouchDB and distributed computing/storage systems like Hadoop.
• Then there is ongoing story of enterprise mashups which bring lightweight integration and composite application development, often by end-users, directly to lines of business. See this list of mashup providers, most of which are offering highly capable solutions.
• Open your supply chain to partners on the Web.
• with open APIs and Web services, it’s now possible to do in such a cost-effective fashion that it could end up being one of the major growth areas of our business.
• I covered this important Enterprise Web 2.0 topic recently so I won’t go into detail here, but if you want double-digit growth during the downturn in whatever otherwise staid industry you are in, there are few more powerful 2.0 techniques for doing it than turning your business into a strategic open platform on the network.
• Going beyond lipservice to green business, transforming how we carry out processes is essential in driving down costs and increasing business agility.
• Overhauling and reinventing paper and digital workflow.
• The DOE reported in 2006 that US paper making alone used 75 Billion KWH and U.S. data centers and servers using another 61 Billion KWH of electricity, never mind that print and digital media supply chain costs can represent as much as 35% of every dollar spent by public and private organizations, exclusive of labor.
• Social networks and their activity streams are increasingly providing a means to start creating emergent workflow as well, though they are not as far along as mashups and Enterprise 2.0 in being able to address this opportunity today.
• The modern technology landscape is an enormous one and the pace of technological change is only increasing, greatly challenging the 21st century organization which still tends to adopt new things in a top down manner.
• Web 2.0 models offer one of the most potent ways we presently have to regroup, reorganize, and systematically improve what we’re doing in terms of private enterprise, government, and public service.

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• Chambers seems genuinely committed to reducing his own personal impact. And the impact and importance of any successor as CEO.
• Can Cisco-style collaboration really work outside of Cisco? Its supporters inside the company argue that the global marketplace and the ubiquity of Web 2.0 tools demand a workforce empowered to generate ideas, solve problems, and contribute to the greater good without micromanagement. Ricci, who meets with 50 to 75 customers a year, says, "It's the No. 1 item on the list of most CEOS -- to break down the barriers, between me and my customers, and me and my partners."
• Chambers's big gamble (and he does gamble; employees talk admiringly of his skill at Liar's Poker) is turning Cisco from a technology company into a leadership consultancy.
• With some key acquisitions in 2006 and 2007, including Scientific Atlanta, Cisco has even signaled that it wants to own the set-top-box market that controls home video, which could pit the company against cable firms and big media.
• And though Cisco doesn't ostensibly charge for consulting services, it could eventually add the Accentures of the world to its competitive set.
• "We're a tech adviser on architecture, yes," Chambers says, "but how does it all tie together? We're really talking about business-process change. And since we've done it for ourselves, we can show others how."
• " Chambers believes that he is seeing the same situation now -- people who are aware that blogs and wikis and Twitter exist but who don't know how to use them safely and effectively. "We've been working on this for seven years," he says. "We've added culture to our core competencies."

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• Mitchell's team created its own "rogue deployment," as he puts it, called C-Vision, a YouTube inside the firewall that has become one of the company's most popular communication tools.
• Most of the videos are short product reports, sales ideas, and engineering updates, all created deskside and published directly to the network with the click of a mouse. No filter, no lawyers. It is a petri dish for ideas and exchange.
• "Collaboration this way helps a world community solve big problems," says vice president Jim Grubb, Chambers's longtime product-demo sidekick. "If we can accelerate the productivity of scientists who are working on the next solar technology because we're hooking them together, we're doing a great thing for the world." And, of course, selling more routers and switches.
• Playing well with others is also an increasingly important part of rank-and-file employees' performance reviews.

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• Cisco, Chambers argues, is the best possible model for how a large, global business can operate: as a distributed idea engine where leadership emerges organically, unfettered by a central command.
• Power to the people -- and profits to the company -- is a bold tech promise we've heard before. If Chambers can pull it off, if he can prove that his model drives innovation at a market-beating pace, he will replace his pal Jack Welch as the most influential leadership guru of the modern era.
• "We want a culture where it is unacceptable not to share what you know,"
• So he promotes all kinds of social networking at Cisco: You can write a blog, upload a video, and tag your myriad strengths in the Facebook-style internal directory.
• "Everybody is an author now," he laughs. Blog posts are voted up based on their helpfulness. There are blogs about blogging and classes about holding classes -- all gauged to make it easy for less-engaged employees to get with the program.
• They are teaching people to use the stuff that Cisco sells -- the routers, switches, IP telephony, data centers, mobile devices -- by starting with their own people.
• Cisco has become a laboratory of connectedness and productivity.
• So that Facebook-style directory at Cisco serves not just as a way to make lunch plans or find a second baseman for a softball game. It is a real-world, real-time sorting apparatus, designed to help anyone inside the company easily find the answer to a question, a product demo, or precisely the right warm body to speak to a waiting customer or present at a conference -- in any language, anywhere around the globe.

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• Chambers wants nothing less than a total redesign of the corporation as we know it. Starting at the top: "You won't have to depend on the CEO anymore."
• he says he came to realize that "some people need a command-and-control environment." But that's not the way of the future: "We now have a whole pool of talent who can lead these working groups, like mini CEOs and COOs. We're growing ideas, but we're growing people as well."
• In fact, he says, "where I might have had two potential successors, I now have 500."
• I am staring at a beamed-in, life-size image of Cisco vice president Ron Ricci in one of the company's Telepresence video-conferencing suites. It is an eerie experience of Star Trekian proportions. The room Ricci is sitting in -- he is in San Jose, I am in New York -- looks exactly like the room I'm sitting in, down to the logo behind me and the wood-paneled conference table in front. (Telepresence, at $300,000 fully loaded, has become Cisco's fastest-growing product.) Except for my initial tendency to holler at his image, it really is as if we're meeting in person.
• "One of the traditional ways you define power in a big corporation is by the resources you control," Ricci says. "It's one of the evil characteristics of corporations. If you control resources for your unilateral use, you can move away from the greater whole, even if you make good decisions. Now we believe it's about learning to bring resources together to the table with groups."
• The boards and councils he and Chambers have created are cross-functional, interdepartmental, even international teams of executive "volunteers," who organize themselves around major initiatives or specific product lines.
• Ricci, for example, convened a board of self-identified sports freaks to brainstorm how Cisco might tap into the sports business.
• Without buy-in or even permission from Chambers, they brought in 15 people with relevant skills -- turning down an invitation to collaborate is not an option -- and built a product called StadiumVision, which allows venue owners to push video and digital content, including targeted advertising, to fans in the stadium. Ultimately, the board collaborated with sales and marketing to win contracts with the Arizona Cardinals, the New York Yankees, and the Dallas Cowboys. A multimillion-dollar business came together in less than 120 days.
• At this year's analyst conference, Cisco introduced a network platform designed to carry secure, high-quality video and other rich media -- ultimately virtualization -- on TVs, PCs, and mobile devices.
• "Any screen you show me, our network can handle it," Chambers told me. MediaNet, as it's known internally, was developed, in corporate terms, practically overnight. Ninety days after the council's first meeting in December 2007, it had a strategy and $25 million in initial investment. Some 120 days later, there was a prototype and more money was allocated. The product will be available in December -- 12 months total. "This is awesome performance," Ricci asserts. "We are doing all this at the vice-president and director level. We don't need John to do this now."

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• The current issue of Fast Company has a cover article on Cisco and their ongoing efforts to reorganize into something that is an excellent case study of what Enterprise 2.0 may look like in an established organization.
• The goal is to spread the company’s leadership and decision making far wider than any big company has attempted before, to working groups that currently involve 500 executives.
• This move, Chambers says, reflects a new philosophy about how business can best work in a networked world.
• " Today, a network of councils and boards empowered to launch new businesses, plus an evolving set of Web 2.0 gizmos — not to mention a new financial incentive system — encourage executives to work together like never before.
• Pull back the tent flaps and Cisco citizens are blogging, vlogging, and virtualizing, using social-networking tools that they’ve made themselves and that, in many cases, far exceed the capabilities of the commercially available wikis, YouTubes, and Facebooks created by the kids up the road in Palo Alto.
• The bumpy part — and the eye-opener — is that the leaders of business units formerly competing for power and resources now share responsibility for one another’s success.
• The goal is to get more products to market faster, and Chambers crows at the results. "The boards and councils have been able to innovate with tremendous speed. Fifteen minutes and one week to get a [business] plan that used to take six months!"
• What used to be "me" is now "we."
• More than anything else, this story provides a well-documented case study that is an existence proof to other skeptical executives that the combination of Enterprise 2.0 technologies and the right organizational principles and practices can succeed.

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• Today, in the midst of an even wilder economic spiral, the company has a cushion of $26 billion in available cash, two dozen promising products in the pipeline -- each of which is targeting a minimum 40% market share -- plus an unprecedented forward-looking strategy to unleash what it's calling a "human network effect" both on and off the Cisco campus.

  • interesting concept
• And Chambers has greater ambitions, even now, in the midst of turmoil. Or, perhaps, especially now. He has been taking Cisco through a massive, radical, often bumpy reorganization.
• The goal is to spread the company's leadership and decision making far wider than any big company has attempted before, to working groups that currently involve 500 executives.
• This move, Chambers says, reflects a new philosophy about how business can best work in a networked world.

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