Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum Blog

I recently met Stan Relihan, having been introduced to him separately by Cameron Reilly of The Podcasting Network fame, leading tech journalist Brad Howarth, and also from further afield Charlene Hutt, one of the leading HR practitioners in Canada. The diverse introductions in themselves illustrate the deeply interconnected nature of social networks.

Stan is an executive recruiter, and also a keen student of and participant in social networks. He ranks in the top 50 most connected people on LinkedIn, with something in the order of 10,000 links, and has a great podcast series, The Connections Show, focusing on the business value of social networks, which is now ranked 4th most prominent business podcast series by Digg.

Stan has just interviewed me for The Connections Show: Click here to go to the podcast interview on Improving Performance and Profitability.

Some of the themes I cover in the interview are how social networking platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn are being used in business, social networking tools specifically for business, the value of organizational network analysis, and the role these network tools play in Enterprise 2.0, including a mention of our Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum.

I have written and being interviewed many times in the last few months on the use of Facebook in organizations.

There are a range of reasons why Facebook is often being blocked inside organizations. In many cases it’s because it’s viewed as a time-waster. However in other cases the concern is more about information loss – competitors finding out who is working for your organization and potentially sensitive information.

Worklight has just released a Facebook application called Workbook, reports Dan Farber, which authenticates users with an organization’s identity systems, and enables closed communication within the Workbook application between Facebook users. In one step Facebook can become an enterprise application, including proprietary discussions.

The application is expected for general release in February. For now it is being trialled in three large institutions, including a global retail bank with 70,000 staff that had received loud complaints from staff when it banned Facebook, and an investment bank that tried to implement an in-house social network based on Sharepoint that its employees didn’t use. The intention is to use Facebook not just internally, but also with clients and fund managers. As I’ve written before, one of the key issues with banning Facebook is that it makes it harder to attract and retain young, talented workers.

We’re very pleased to announce that IBM is Platinum Sponsor of the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum. Given the breadth and maturity of IBM’s Web 2.0 offerings for large organizations, as well as its own experiences in using these tools internally, this makes a lot of sense and will bring a lot of value to the event.

I’ve written extensively about IBM’s initiatives in the space. In January IBM launched Lotus Connections, a suite of collaboration software which today brings much of IBM’s Web 2.0-style offerings, establishing a solid, coherent, credible offering to corporations. Just over two years ago now I blogged about how Lotus was embedding blogs and wikis into IBM’s platforms, in line with their vision that social networking tools were the future of collaboration. Over five years ago, in my book Living Networks, I wrote about how IBM’s alphaWorks provided a platform for user innovation and product development, while earlier this year I pointed to one of alphaWorks’ fantastic initiatives, ManyEyes, which is a participative site for people to upload and mash-up data sets and visualization techniques.

Just today the Lotus Connections suite has expanded further, with the launch of IBM Atlas, a set of social networking visualization and analysis tools. It has four components:

The first hard-copy flyer for our Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum has just been mailed out. Click here or on the image below to download the flyer as pdf.

Below is the text for the cover letter which went out with the flyer. More detailed updates on the event coming soon.

There has been some very interesting discussion over the last week about enterprise software, which began with the question of whether it is sexy or not. It has since covered a wide range of related topics, including the usability of enterprise software, industry structure, how it is bought, its role in attracting talented staff, and whether it can get people laid. (Selected references at the bottom of the post.)

In all of this, there was a gem that I think is well worth exploring. In the context of market opportunities for the biggest enterprise software firm of them all, SAP, Sigurd Rinde wrote (in part):

A Business Process is any process, sequential work or activity, that happens in an organisation. Some are repeatable and linear, others happens in unstructured ways and are hard to model.

Let me keep it simple and divide process types into two groups:

1. The Easily Repeatable Process (ERP for me)

Processes that handles resources, from human (hiring, firing, payroll and more) to parts and products through supply chains, distribution and production. The IT systems go under catchy names like ERP, SCM, PLM, SRM, CRM and the biggest players are as we know SAP and Oracle plus a long roster of smaller firms.

Known to be rigid, but handles events and transactions with precision and in volume. Systems delivers value through extensive reports and full control over resources.

Resource oriented, transactional, event driven systems. Delivered by system vendors with roots in accounting using up to 25 year old technological solutions.

When I spoke at KMWorld07 in Silicon Valley last month, I sat in on the presentation made by Charles Armstrong of Trampoline Systems. One of the interesting points he made is that Web 2.0 is the first set of technologies that have been developed in the consumer space before being taken into enterprise use. All other major information technologies have first been developed and used in large organizations before being adapted for consumer use, not least by becoming accessible on price.

I’ve often observed that Enterprise 2.0 initiatives largely stem from executives seeing their children using sites like Facebook, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Digg, YouTube or Remember the Milk, and thinking, “Hmm, I can see that kind of tool being useful inside my organization.”

It is very useful to think of it specifically as that issue: adapting consumer tools and software to be useful inside organizations.

One obvious issue is that of scale. As I point out in my Web 2.0 Framework, one of the key aspects of Web 2.0 is that it “collectively transforms mass participation into valuable outcomes.” In the case of the open consumer web, that mass participation can amount to literally hundreds of millions of people. Organizations at the most have hundreds of thousands, and often far fewer people. This means there are a range of issues in effectively scaling Web 2.0 applications to be valuable inside organizations. However the other side of that is that far more detailed information is available on workers inside companies, including their current projects, training background, work objectives and more, all of which means that aggregating information can be far more usefully applied than in the open web.

Building on the theme of adapting Web 2.0 technologies to be valuable inside organizations, Network Computing has recently published a very good piece titled Can Web 2.0 evolve into an Enterprise Technology? It’s well worth a read. Some of the points it raises:

* Since Web 2.0 gives power to users, it can reduce IT staffing levels. Nutritional products firm Shaklee has reduced IT staff by 20%. It is a significant change issue to have IT staff support these shifts.

There was a good article in The Australian on Tuesday titled Taking residence in virtual worlds, which looked at what some of Australia’s leading companies are doing with Web 2.0 technologies. It quoted me:

"Almost all major Australian organisations have put this on their radar and begun trials," Future Exploration Network chairman Ross Dawson says.

"Next year is when this will be a standard approach or framework to look at how organisations shift information architecture. In most cases it's not a question of taking out existing tech but using complementary systems."

I have spent much of the last month or so speaking to Australia’s leading companies, technology journalists, and thought leaders in the field in order to uncover the best examples of Enterprise 2.0 in Australia to showcase at Future Exploration Network’s Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum on 19 February 2008 in Sydney. More on what I have uncovered and the event itself shortly – there are many very exciting developments on the forum to share.

Certainly what I have found is that just about every major organization has at least a toe in the Enterprise 2.0 waters at least somewhere within the folds of its operations. One innovator in one of Australia’s largest organizations, with a larger international than domestic presence, told me of a number of interesting initiatives in one of its business units, then said, “but of course we’d be forced to shut it down if the senior executives found out about it.” In other cases initiatives are not deliberately hidden from executives, but they receive no support. However a good proportion of organizations are engaging in officially sanctioned pilots of wikis or blogs, taking steps to make social networking useful, or using other social media tools. The majority are pretty early stage, and not experiments they care to share externally. However we are getting to the point at which there are solid examples of corporates getting real value from Enterprise 2.0 approaches.

This is good. A new organization, the Blog Council, has just launched. To quote their release:

CHICAGO, December 6, 2007 -- The Blog Council, a professional community of top global brands dedicated to promoting best practices in corporate blogging, officially launched today. Founding members include the leading companies from a diverse range of business sectors: AccuQuote, Cisco Systems, The Coca-Cola Company, Dell, Gemstar-TV Guide, General Motors, Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft, Nokia, SAP, and Wells Fargo.

The Blog Council exists as a forum for executives to meet one another in a private, vendor-free environment and share tactics, offer advice based on past experience, and develop standards-based best practices as a model for other corporate blogs.

…

A quick review of Day One of IIR's Enterprise 2.0 conference. After my opening keynote, including my six lessons on Enterprise 2.0, Steve Hodgkinson of Ovum addressed the question, 'Does Your Organisation Need Enterprise 2.0?' One of the great examples he used is fixmystreet.com, which allows individuals to submit work orders to their local council to fix things. While this is just a website someone has set up, councils are actively responding to the requests. Or at least some are, and it's easy to find which councils are and aren't responding to their constituents' complaints. Steve also presented a useful framework on the relevance of Enterprise 2.0 to organizations, as below, which comes from an interesting Ovum report on Enterprise 2.0.

Factors that influence the extent to which an organization will need, or value, enterprise 2.0

Nigel Watson of Microsoft described the history of blogging at Microsoft, from the early days through to the breadth of blogging across the enterprise that there is today. While I'm familiar with the history, it was good to hear it again. I didn't realize that Microsoft doesn't have an explicit blogging policy, and that Microsoft's general employee policies are seen as sufficient. One of Microsoft's interesting internal social media channels is Academy Mobile, which uses mobile delivery for its online learning content.

I will be doing the opening keynote at tomorrow’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Sydney. The slides are below for reference purposes for those who attended. As always, note that the slides are not very meaningful without the accompanying speech, explanations, and case studies.

While the slides are similar to the presentation I did at KMWorld in Silicon Valley a few weeks ago, the overall positioning and messages are quite different.

This is best reflected in the closing “Six Lessons for Enterprise 2.0” I will offer in tomorrow’s keynote, summarized below:

1. Make governance an enabler. The reason why most large organizations are slow to adopt Enterprise 2.0 tools is that senior executives are uncertain about the implications, and as a result cautious or worse. Governance needs to be in place to allay those fears, without stifling the emergent, participative nature of how the new tools create value for organizations.

2. Start from business applications, not tools. Far too often people want to implement blogs, wikis, tagging, or other tools. This is completely the wrong way around. The starting point has to be a specific business application, such as project management, product development, sales support or any number of functions that relate directly to business value.