Social Glass

Update: I’ve had to change the name of this post to use “and” as it seems RSS is not tolerant of special characters.
I’ve intertwined discussion around the value proposition of Enterprise 2.0 in several posts (like here and here), and thought it fitting to be clearer and more direct about areas in which Enterprise 2.0 adds value to the enterprise. I read a lot of blogs on the topic, and while we spend a lot of time covering its theoretical aspects it’s important not to forget that “Enterprise 2.0″ is intended for enterprises, and most enterprises exist to make money. In my view, then, Enterprise 2.0 will take off once:

1. A few brave and cutting edge enterprises incorporate social software into their intranet (at reduced consulting rates since they’re the first) and we begin to establish emperical “quals” (i.e. a list of companies that have done this already).
2. These early adopters show definitive gains in profitability (+$) that can be linked to their Enterprise 2.0 implementation.

At this point I think we’re waiting for the early adopters to take shape, so over the next few months I’ll be covering reasons why they should consider Enterprise 2.0.

Mergers and Acquisitions

I recently had dinner with a couple of friends of mine who are lawyers in the Mergers and Acquisitions space here in Australia. We discussed reasons why one company would seek to buy another, or why a company would wish to be sold. A lot of the reasons had to do with assets and liabilities, but some of them had to do with intellectual property.

A successful Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem augments the intellectual property of an organisation by harnessing the tacit knowledge of its workforce through a writable intranet. The augmentation is enhanced when an effective Discovery mechanism is put in place making intellectual property easy to find.

Based on this, a company seeking to be purchased would significantly benefit from having implemented an Enterprise 2.0 solution. It’s intellectual property would be tangible, content-rich and verifiable. And this means less risk for a potential buyer when the acquisition of intellectual property is a primary driver.

I wrote a post a few weeks ago about styling JEE (aka J2EE, some people can’t shake the “2″ even though we’re up to Java version 5 now) applications to give them a web 2.0 look and feel. Since then I got to thinking about JEE and whether or not it’s really relevant to the Web 2.0 world.

The issue is scalability.

I’ve spent the better part of my career with my head down, headphones on, techno music thumping, banging out J2EE-based (and some .NET) EAI solutions for large enterprises. These applications, at best, were scoped to target a user base of 10,000, and we never expected to have more than a couple hundred concurrent web-based user sessions.

Contrast that to google.com which deals with a couple million concurrent user sessions. And I know google.com is not JEE-based. It’s likely built with a light-weight scripting language (probably Pearl or Python give my experience with Google and their enterprise applications) with a lot of load-balanced servers behind it.

I haven’t done any official research, but in my experience most of the web 2.0 sites I’ve come across have not been JEE-based either. Most seem to run PHP (digg.com). Some seem to run Ruby on Rails. There’s one web 2.0 site that I know of that’s run on the JEE platform, and that’s zoho.com (the “.do” at the end of some of the links on zoho.com, i.e. http://wiki.zoho.com/jsp/ wikilogin.jsp?targetURL=%2Fregister.do, is a “verb” in Struts, an opensource JEE model view controller from Apache).

The question is, can JEE scale with the Long Tail? With internet access being nearly ubiquitous, websites will potentially have to handle hundreds of thousands of simultaneous transactions. Is JEE, a framework that’s great for the enterprise where there are a relatively small amount of simultaneous transactions, appropriate for coping with world-wide scale?

I hope so. But maybe lighter-weight, narrow-purposed scripting languages are more ideal.

Anyway, if you have experience with JEE dealing with “internet-sized” volumes, or if you know of any other JEE-based web 2.0 sites, please let me know.

Update: Jean-Luc has provided a link to a whitepaper on blogs and wikis written by the CIA in 2005. It’s a worthwhile read.

I was thinking about some of the core traits of Enterprise 2.0 the other day and was starting to see parallels to historical movements that have shaken entrenched social orders. Enterprise 2.0 represents a dramtic cultural change to traditional businesses. It flattens hierarchies, removes barriers between divisions and encourages knowledge workers to innovate. Innovation happens when knowledge workers feel free to question long-established procedural norms and ask “why?”.

Specifically, the “Hippie ideology” seems to share something in common with Enterprise 2.0. Princeton University defines the term “hippie” as

someone who rejects the established culture; advocates extreme liberalism in politics and lifestyle

Ok, so maybe the “extreme liberalism” part isn’t relevant, but certainly rejecting an established culture is. Hippies sprang from the counter-culture movement of the 60’s and embraced a sense of goodwill and love, with these being possible through some sort of utopian idea of altruism - that is the act of doing good for others for the sake of doing good.

Certainly altruism is a driving force behind Enterprise 2.0. Without it spontaneous collaboration and Enteprise 2.0 as a whole would fail. Knowledge workers need to be willing to help each other and author content or else all of this is for naught. But are we meant to believe that the foundation of Enteprise 2.0 is built on some harmonious concept of good will? Is there really incentive in opening up cheap or free services to business partners and the world and taking time to help the guy in Commercial Services with his question? Is Enterprise 2.0 for Hippies?

No.

Jevon McDonald, CEO of Firestoker and blogger at socialwrite.com, wrote a recent whitepaper where he argued that “Radical Transparency” is a byproduct of Enterprise 2.0. I agree. I am a firm believer that transparency manifests integrity (that’s why I named my blog socialglass, “glass” being transparent). Are companies afraid that opening their doors will reveal that the “door” is nothing more than a facade, that there’s nothing of value inside? Maybe. But instead of asking “why should I share this information?”, enterprises should start to ask “why shouldn’t I share it?”.

Transparency comes about when content from knowledge workers is as discoverable to the CEO as that from the CIO. It also happens when enterprises open up services to the outside world. Recognition, then, is the driving incentive for transparency. Enterprises get credit for creating a service that is, say, used in a mashup to help another enterprise excel. Knowledge workers get credit when the CEO reads their blogs.

As Rod Boothby points out, it is Adam Smith’s notion of the “Invisible Hand” that drives the Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem. A knowledge worker “…intends only his own gain”, he seeks recognition which can ultimately lead to promotion and increased salary. In describing the driving force behind free markets, Smith writes:

By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.

The “selfish” contributions made by knowledge workers makes the enterprise as a whole better off. And the services the enterprise opens up makes other enterprises better off, and this is consitent with the “Invisible Hand”.

Enterprise 2.0 is not based on utopian ideals. It is instead based on the very principles that drive all free-market economies. Organisations that adopt enterprise 2.0 will do so for auto-preservation and corporate gain - to help their bottom line. Period.

I recently read a post by Caroline McCarthy at CNET about Web 2.0’s reliance on the word Beta. She points out that organisations have grown to love being in Beta mode, because “…it seems like a convenient way to avoid taking responsibility for technical issues”. Beta is akin to a disclaimer, if it doesn’t work don’t blame us, we’re in Beta.

Caroline goes on to suggest that Beta isn’t just a cop-out. Web 2.0 embraces the Agile Manifesto for Software Development, and Web 2.0 organisations are constantly fixing and adding features to their site. So, they may stay in Beta forever, and the wording might therefore be suitable.

Fine.

But is it appropriate for us to put the tagline “Beta” beneath the glossy logos of enterprise applications? Are we going to sell potential clients on Enterprise 2.0 and release the next generation of the intranet in Beta mode? It seems to me that if I were the client I’d want the solution I’d just paid large amounts of money for to be fully-baked, comprehensive and bug-free.

So, while I hail the arrival of Web 2.0 behind the firewall, I acknowledge there are some traits that are not appropriate for the Enterprise. The last thing we need to do is litter our solutions with disclaimers. An Enterprise 2.0 solution must be just as professional as a Siebel implementation.

We’re starting to see good corporate interest in the next generation of the intranet. There’s no doubt executives have been exposed to articles such as this Gartner Report which highlights Web 2.0 as adding significant value to the corporate intranet over the next few years, or this Business Week article entitled Web 2.0 has Corporate America Spinning (enough said).

To me the value proposition Enterprise 2.0 brings to the table is obvious, a no-brainer. And, in my experience, a well thought out presentation certainly sparks the interest of the aforementioned corporate executive.

But, it seems that most companies that recognise a need to “upgrade” their intranet are skiddish when it comes to implementing a full-blown SLATES solution. These companies, instead, have identified a glaring hole in their ability to discover content and are interested initially in the first “S” in SLATES, Search (or Enterprise Search).

We must not forget all of those, shall I say, Enterprise 1.0 applications that are still necessary and add value to the enterprise. Companies still need to be able to invoice their customers, process payments, store customer account details, manage the sales process, provision services and view reports on the state of said transactional processes. Enterprise Search compliments these systems making information from them AND knowledge stored on the intranet searchable. Google, for example, has a tremendous Enterprise Search offering, and we’ve seen it add value quickly for a lot of clients.

The lesson learned here is, while the Enteprise 2.0 utopia mandates the deployment and adoption of a SLATES-oriented solution, we must not forget how far off many companies are from realizing the comprehensive value proposition of Enterprise 2.0. Search allows companies to quickly harness information from assets they’ve already invested in and does little in the way of changing the work habits their employees have developed over the years (i.e. Search indexes MS Word documents so others can find them, so knowledge workers can continue using MS Word).

After Search has been implemented and the chaos of the “legacy” corporate intranet has been contained we’ll find companies to be more receptive to the remaining LATES in “SLATES”.