Social Glass

I was reading ITSInsider yesterday and was thrilled to discover Enterprise 2.0 TV.  I love the idea and definitely recommend you check it out.

I’ve stated a few times that I work for a global consulting firm that generates most of its revenue from large, systems integration projects using Oracle or SAP technologies.  I’ve been on several projects like these over the years and I’m a bit tired of them.

To me the sexiest thing happening in the industry is Enterprise 2.0, hands down.  The problem is the revenue model is unproven.  There is a lot of risk for companies like mine in investing too much time in technologies that may not yield the profit margins that complex SI projects do.

There is a small and growing group of us that is determined to make Enterprise 2.0 work both internally and externally.  The challenge for us is prioritizing this with our “day jobs” - the complex projects that actually make us profitable.  This may be the reason why larger companies get on board with industry trends closer to the top of the bell curve.  I think there’s a great opportunity for smaller companies to establish themselves in the Enterprise 2.0 market, but I’ll also warn that time is running out for them as large players like Oracle, BEA, Microsoft and IBM get into the mix, and CIOs are used to doing business with these organizations.

In the Enterprise 2.0 space we spend a lot of time discussing meta-innovation, that is, innovation about how to innovate. Paula Thornton over at the FASTForward blog makes a good point that innovation is a human ability and Enterprise 2.0 is simply an innovation enabler - “Technologies can be deemed ‘innovative’, but do not innovate.” And while the thoughts and concepts around how to create an innovation factory ecosystem are superb, I haven’t seen much development around what should be done once innovative ideas are recognized. How do corporations actually discover and harness innovation from the Enterprise 2.0 cloud?

Enter the Innovation Maturity Model.

Enterprise 2.0 is largely about Discovery and Collaboration - the process of finding content and people, and working together to drive to an outcome. This process encourages idea sharing and development from the ground up, as the capacity for 1000’s of knowledge workers to innovate is far greater than that of a few top executives (Rod Boothby).

There needs to be a community of people who are able to find and recognize innovative ideas from the Enterprise 2.0 cloud. These ideas need to be aggregated and refined so that policy makers can understand them and their business relevance. Once understood, these policy makers then decide if the innovative ideas are mature enough to become part of corporate policy or even corporate strategy.

This process lends itself to the notion of the “moderator” - a body that controls the flow if ideas from the Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem toward corporate adoption. ECM (Enterprise Content Management) has traditionally played in the “mature content” realm, and I think one could make a strong case that Enterprise 2.0 and traditional ECM are complimentary when it comes to maturing innovation. Policies and strategies need to be guarded and locked down and cannot rise and fall with the changing tides of collective enterprise intelligence (thought it was time to get a little poetic).

I thought I’d condense information I’ve gathered about Enterprise 2.0 (much of it from Rod Boothby’s whitepaper video), into a thesis statement on Enterprise 2.0.  So here it goes:

In this day and age where competition is global and products and services are cheap due to the increasing economic potency of emerging markets, innovation is the only means through which organizations can remain competitive.  Price is no longer an area where organizations can hope to compete.  They must instead foster an environment that encourages innovation and produces a constant stream of innovative services and solutions.  Many executives believe that they are the innovators for their companies, but in reality the capacity for 1000’s of employees to come up with innovative ideas far outweighs that of 10 or so top-level executives.

Most organizations have failed to tap into one of their richest assets - the tacit knowledge of their workforce. There is often a large distance between formal procedural documentation and how work actually is done. Furthermore, divisions within large companies often fail to collaborate effectively because they don’t know who else within the organization has similar interests or is working on similar initiatives, or they can’t find the information they need and end up re-inventing the wheel.

Enterprise 2.0 - the state of the art in collaborative software modeled after Web 2.0 techniques and patterns - provides an ecosystem that encourages innovation, facilitates the capture of tacit data, and creates a spirit of collaboration due to the participatory and social nature of its technologies. This allows enterprises to become more efficient due to increased sharing and discovery of knowledge, and helps enterprises maintain competitive advantage by fostering innovation from within.

I find it interesting as a blogger that, several months after a post is written, I get a flurry of comments on it. One tends to think that people only read the latest posts, but the evidence seems to contradict this perception.

Anyway, I found the recent post at rc3.org about RubyonRails being slow very interesting. I posted a few months ago about Java’s ability to scale with the long tail and recently received some well put comments indicating that the speed of Java is just fine, and that speed issues are generally caused by bad architecture. I argued that the popularity of PHP and Rails over Java in the Web 2.0 space seemed to show that those languages/platforms were perceived to scale well with the long tail (whereas Java seems to be king inside the Enterprise, which tends to have a much lower user base).  It seems that, at least with Ruby on Rails, the perception was based more on hype than fact.
Twitter’s recent popularity has been a good Stress and Volume Testing ground for Rails, which is a relatively new platform, and it seems that Rails is much slower than Java, PHP or Python platforms. This idea is raised at rc3.org, where Rafe Colburn writes:

I do wonder, though, if this kind of information [Twitter’s statement that Rails is slow] is going to push some startups over to PHP or Java, even if they’d prefer the development efficiencies offered by Rails.

I’m pulling for Java.