But then it started to die down.  While our company user count is high in Yammer, volume is restricted mostly to a small group of 15 people, all of whom work in the same division.  Maybe it’s a coincidence that we work on the Consumer Media side of the house, and that the others who initially signed up are less social media savvy.  But I think we’ve drowned the other guys out.  The 15 remaining people use Yammer to:

• Share links to Proof of Concepts or blog posts
• Broadcast when servers are being rebooted
• Declare deadlines for code deployments
• Indicate when a service is down or unresponsive
• Let others know they’ll be out of the office for an hour

But what I’m really interested in is what’s happening elsewhere in my company.  What new service is the enterprise services group releasing into Beta?  What new ad campaigns is the marketing group launching?  Does anybody want to start a Ruby on Rails is not scalable debate?

My conclusion: Yammer is great for my team, but the signal to noise ratio flushes the rest of the organization out as others don’t seem to care about what’s important to my group.

Update:  It looks like Paul Dunay, Global Director of Integrated Marketing at BearingPoint, is the man responsible for newthinking.bearingpoint.com.

“Do you still want Software Requirement Specifications?” they’d ask.

“No, just give me user stories“.

“What’s a user story?”

“Uh, well tell me a story from the user’s perspective. We’ll collaborate on design and further detail the feature during the sprint period. And remember, you’re a pig and that guy over there’s a chicken.”

“Oh. Well I’d rather just give you an SRS. And why are you talking about farm animals?”

The main issue, as I’ve come to discover, is that people are entrenched in the waterfall method. Strategize, design, build, test, deploy, operate. People find comfort in this model. It’s all they’ve known. So I’ve been challenged as a middle manager to implement agile software development processes. A friend of mine says it’s impossible to do without executive sponsorship. Somebody’s gotta make the product owners do this, otherwise they’ll fall back to their comfort zone.

A long road lies ahead I’m afraid.

But the UI sucks.

Oh yeah, and it’s not people focused. Well at least not as people focused as Clearspace. We use Clearspace externally, and through our relationship with Jive also have an enterprise license. So to me it was a no brainer that we’d rollout Clearspace instead of Confluence.

But before that would happen I had to show why the “people” element was important. All the sponsoring group wanted to do was provide a space to collaborate around content. They weren’t considering the serendipitous establishment of weak ties between disconnected employees, and that people connecting around shared interests would boost efficiency at a hard-to-measure macro level.

After several weeks of debating over email we’ve decided to go with Clearspace, to my joy. I’m stoked to start using it with my China team, to find out more about who they are as people, and for them to get a feel for who we are as people too.

The one point that’s hard to drive home, however, is that knowledge will always be federated. During my consulting career and even here I’ve consistently run into people who want to create a single repository that will house all important corporate information assets, and that said repository will be the single place for people to turn to to find information. Such was the impetus behind our original corporate wiki. Although we’re not there yet, I’m starting to convince people that Discovery must be the center point of our Enterprise 2.0 rollout.

In time, I hope.

So why is Andrew McAfee still talking about why email sucks? Haven’t we heard this story time and time again? Why don’t we talk more about how Enterprise 2.0 has helped companies, about how it’s had the dramatic impact that we predicted two years ago? Maybe it’s because it’s not happening, or maybe it’s because the doers are quietly doing and have no time to blog about it.

With that, I’m super stoked about TechCrunch’s new enterprise software-focused blog, TechCrunchIT. TechCrunch has been the defacto leader in all things Web 2.0. Maybe they’ll bring some fresh thinking to the Enterprise 2.0 space.

Stop.

As Dion Hinchliffe says (and as I have written before),

“Discoverability isn’t an after thought , it’s the core”

Organizations need to embrace the fact that their data will be federated. Sure, workers will put their documents in “wiki X”, but they’ll also put them on the file share, in content management systems, and on email servers. Data that cannot be found is useless. Enterprise search will unlock data and increase the propensity for information (and the knowledge workers who create it) to be discovered. Discoverability leads to recognition, and recognition leads to increased participation. Enterprise 2.0 must be approached holistically.

Clearspace doesn’t do this. Thoughtfarmer doesn’t do this. Mindtouch doesn’t do this. There is no “Enterprise 2.0 in a box” solution. Period.

When I started I came in guns ablazing with a consultant’s mindset. “What, no data warehouse, no sweat. We’ll implement a master data management strategy and breathe life into dying data. And let me tell you about this nifty little thing called Enterprise 2.0. It’s going to revolutionize the world, man. Ever heard of SLATES?”. Sarcasm aside, people had actually heard about Enterprise 2.0 and were actually keen on the idea. But seeing things from the other side I’m starting to think Enterprise 2.0 will be overwhelming for many.

Here’s the logic: Enterprise 2.0 assumes that, within corporations, there are a lot of unsung heroes who’s voices are muffled by a thick wall of bureaucracy. These under-utilized knowledge workers are in dire need of a platform through which their ideas can transcend old-fashioned hierarchical structure so that their potential can be fully realized. Enterprise 2.0 promises meritocracy.

Sweet.

But consider alternative reasoning: Good workers are already very busy. Their managers already know they’re good and are filtering a saturating set of inquiries and non-critical disturbances into a trickle. Trickles enable concentration, and concentration is needed for people to do good work.

So why in God’s name would a very busy person want to put himself in a position to be even busier by seeking corporate-wide recognition for his bright ideas? He’s already well compensated. He’s already highly regarded. Why make life harder?

Good workers might run and hide from Enterprise 2.0 (and bad ones might embrace it).

Chuck Hollis

1. EMC has over 35,000 employees and, among other things, makes two knowledge management systems, Documentum and eRoom, and yet they chose to use neither for their social productivity needs.
2. Regarding rollout strategy, Chuck says they “…announced availability virally — we all pushed email announcements to people we knew who were interested in what we were doing. We wanted people to “find” us, and not have some sort of official corporate announcement”. The initial rollout would be to supporters of the initiative who would be patient while they ironed out the kinks. But what happened was that EMC employees who nobody knew started using the system.
3. The result of unanticipated use, or “the network effect”, was confusion as to how to distribute the costs of the investment across the organization. If Divison A purchased Clearspace but users from Division B started using it extensively, shouldn’t part of the cost come from Division B’s budget?
4. HR had to get involved implementing a “social engineering” program to get workers used to this new way of collaborating.
5. Chuck says “It’s now “cool” to be an active participant on EMC ONE”.

As a result of implementing Enterprise 2.0, Chuck says “We now have so many business value stories that we don’t really need any more to make our case, even to the most stubborn ROI cynic”. EMC ONE has

• Connected employees from remote outposts (like China)
• Become a repository for research and a platform for “ideation”.
• The salesforce is much better informed as it can leverage conversations from the platform

Again, check out Sam’s summary here to get more insight and detail.

• Links
• Social Bookmarking
• Search
• Authorship
• Signals/Syndication
• Social Networking
• Folksonomies

And maybe that’s all there is to Enterprise 2.0 from a technology perspective. I suppose we could also talk about prediction markets and knowledge markets adding those to the mix. But I think we’ve exhausted all of the technical possibilities.

So I ask, is Enterprise 2.0 stagnating? What I mean is, is there anything else that needs to be thought out and developed, or is it time to simply start doing it?

I’d like to direct your attention to a post by Jevon MacDonald called Enterprise 2.0: Where the f$#@ is my market? where he asks:

Is there such thing as an Enterprise 2.0 market? If so, can you sell in to it? If not: are there startups trying to sell to customers who don’t exist?

and answers by stating:

There is no Enterprise 2.0 market. Enterprise 2.0 budgets do not exist, except where some early adoptors create them, and there is no Enterprise 2.0 sales cycle. There are very few incentive available to experts right now and the discontinuity that has arisen in the concept is a symptom of that.

Jevon goes on to argue that an Enterprise 2.0 Software Market is validated only when there is a problem that software can solve on its own. Otherwise “The people who are making the most money off this term right now are consultants who are helping their clients navigate some of the fluff from the substance”.

I agree with this. As a consultant I’ve always considered Enterprise 2.0 to be more about shifting corporate culture than introducing new technology (although I write a lot about technology in this blog). I remember a quote from Paula Thornton where she wrote “..how many psychologists do you have on your team” as “we’re building products that should be influenced by the laws of human nature” instead of advances in technology.

When implementing Enterprise 2.0 we need to include strategies to change old school mindsets and get people to ask “why shouldn’t I share this information” instead of “why should I share this information”, for example.

Jevon does go on to say that Enterprise 2.0 software can be successful when focusing on industry verticals where, after a series of successful implementations there, a broader, more horizontal market might appear. Check out his post here.

“Security is not about zero risk it is about managed risk. Accept there will be a few security failures.

“No risk means no reward. Stop talking about all the bad things that can happen and talk about what these technologies enable”…

“Relax, innovate. The goal is managed risk.”

Read more at computerworld.com.au.

Dion Hinchliffe wrote a great post about challenges facing enterprise mashups. He identifies 10:

1. No Commonly Accepted Assembly Model
2. An Immature Services Landscape
3. The Splintering of Widgets
4. Management and Support of End-User Mashup Apps
5. Deep Support for Security and Identity
6. Data Quality and Accuracy
7. Version Management
8. Awareness and Realization of the Potential of Mashups by the Business Community
9. Low Levels of Support by Major Software Firms
10. Few Killer Demo Apps

In my professional life I’ve encountered obstacles around items 2 and 4 when discussing enterprise mashups with potential clients. We can show impressive demos, like IBM’s QEDWiki, but we’d need a seriously mature SOA to build the “widgets” a knowledge worker would use to create such a mashup (issue 2). And Dion asks who’s going to support these things once they break? “The IT department? The business units? Using what tools” (issue 4). Good question.

At the end of the day an enterprise must have a strong SOA initiative and support from IT before the value proposition behind enterprise mashups can be fully realized.

Build applications that get more valuable as more people use them (network effects) and work out ways to let end users contribute to your application, customize your application and extend your application, thus encouraging even more value to emerge over time.

Well stated I’d say.

Avenue A Razorfish is now evolving their wiki to include more features. I’d like to direct you to their blog post which contains an embedded slideshare presentation that explains their approach. They’ve definitely got some great ideas.

1. Enterprise Search: Enable “Discovery” across legacy content repositories. The enterprise can realize the benefit of the investment it’s already made in content management and knowledge capture.
2. Social Collaboration: Deploy social collaboration tools to catalyze the generation of persisted tacit knowledge. Remove the barriers to content publishing and idea refinement.
3. Mashups: Create a set of widgets that sit on top of legacy systems and social collaboration tools. Provide an easy way to for non-technical users to create rich, dynamic applications (like QEDwiki or Yahoo Pipes).

In this way the traditional organization can implement SLATES (and social networking and mashups) in a staged manner and slowly adapt to social collaboration during the process.

Surprisingly, within corporations I can ‘find’ anyone by name, but their name tells me very little about them. Reading what they have to say and/or seeing what their deliverables are (even just the metadata about them) is revealing. All of this reinforces the concepts of emergent: it’s the sweet spot between chaos and order…

This got me thinking about a post my boss wrote about information management where he discusses a Master Data Management scenario where the enterprise attempts to define a human entity by pulling in metadata from disparate sources (it took me a while to understand the scenario as I’m not a data guy by the way, but once I got it it made a lot of sense). This is an area that Enterprise 2.0 overlooks. Most corporations have a lot of information about their employees already (without Enterprise 2.0), but the problem is it’s scattered. And this is where data management plays a key role.

Imagine a scenario where we not only deployed an Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem (knowledge market, blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, social networking, enterprise search etc.) but also implemented a data management strategy to harvest the metadata about all human entities within the organization from all of the legacy, “1.0″ systems. We could then define a single and discoverable master identify for a person and enrich the social discovery process significantly. We might define a relationship between the human entity and any of the following legacy assets:

• project deliverables (word documents)
• project plans
• white papers
• resume
• skill set (Java, C#, SQL etc – most HR systems store this info)
• position in the corporate hierarchy

This approach makes sense for the enterprise because it leverages the legacy investment it spent years patching and upgrading. It makes sense for knowledge workers because we can link them to their legacy footprint (so they get credit for work they’ve already done) and to the emergent data we get out of Enterprise 2.0.

Defining the human entity in this way needs to be an integral part of any Enterprise 2.0 rollout.

It struck me how sophisticated web applications have become and how much I depend on my browser for work. Other than MS Office and Eclipse, I haven’t had to install a “thick client” for in about two years. And I think application development will increasingly be web-oriented, especially given the popularity of the SaaS model.

I can see a time in the not too distant future where the term “thick client” will appear in IT history text books. College students will read about these clunky applications IT departments had to deploy on each and every PC once upon a time. And I think Enterprise 2.0 adoption will be a key contributing factor toward the archival of non-web-oriented applications.

But the “single instance” approach might be more of a utopian ideal. We often talk about having a bottom up, non-sanctioned approach to Enterprise 2.0 adoption. Bottom up often entails disparate groups creating their own collaboration environments for specific needs, and the result is wiki proliferation. And I’m not sure there’s much corporate IT can do to keep this from happening.

So, pragmatically speaking, it makes sense for the enterprise to embrace wiki federation. This can be accomplished through Enterprise Search. Slap a Google Search Appliance or FAST instance inside the firewall, point it to the federated wikis, and we have discoverability across all collaboration tools. This negates the impetus behind moving the enterprise toward a single collaboration tool instance. Of course the challenge here is to keep the search index up to date with all of the new wikis that popup. But that’s why we have IT guys.

But I must say my natural inclination is to write and email MS Word documents – especially when it’s crunch time and the rest of the team can care less about Enterprise 2.0 – we need to make a deadline. In fact, I’ve noticed that in the face of pressure people tend to abandon Enterprise 2.0 all together and fall back on communication methods they’re used to. Everybody uses email, everybody is expected to respond to email, and a lot of important work gets done via email.

I suppose the point is cultural change is hard. It’s hard not to fall back on old habits. But I suppose to make this work I need to be stern and fight my inclinations.

I find it interesting reading about IT being clueless when it comes to Enterprise 2.0 (like Paula Thornton’s recent post over at the FASTForward blog). I do a lot of work in the Enterprise Search space (Search being the first “S” in SLATES), and more often than not we are approached by IT departments looking for a Search solution. They understand the difficulty knowledge workers face in finding enterprise content. I’ve worked closely with several IT departments to integrate Search on their intranets – a task that is very security intensive as Search musn’t expose knowledge workers to content they don’t have access to, and this means close involvement with IT.

I’ve written about this before as have others, but Enterprise Search needs to be the focal point of any Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem. Companies should invest in Search first – they must enable discovery – before collaboration can happen. I applaud the IT departments I’ve dealt with in taking this first step.

So no, I don’t think IT is really clueless.

So where are all of the Enterprise 2.0 implementations that we were expecting this year? It’s already the middle of May, and as far as I know there haven’t been any major announcements of large-scale E2.0 roll outs. But maybe that’s just it. Maybe there will never be any sudden, large-scale adoption from a major company. And to me this makes sense.

We talk about bottom-up adoption (a slow process), and in my experience this is exactly what’s happening. I spoke to another client about Enterprise 2.0 the other day, and while to most of them this was brand new, one member raised his hand and said they’d been using wikis, social networking and Google Map mashups across a few groups for a while. “Really, cool” – the others said. This revelation also helped legitimize what I was saying, as someone from within their organization had independently discovered these tools and found value in them without influence from me or my firm.

So, to answer my question, Enterprise 2.0 implementations are coming, quietly, slowly, and from the bottom-up.

Why is is so popular? Because it gives control to the user. It’s an application that allows the user to dynamically generate tools to help them do their jobs better. Given the un-restraining characteristics of this application and the fact that it’s so prevalent, why have we endeavored for so long to build business applications and knowledge sharing tools behave in the opposite fashion by imposing pre-determined constraints and rules?

Enterprise mashups, and even wikis and blogs, will succeed because they follow the same fundamental principles that Excel does. They presuppose very little about how knowledge workers do their jobs and are malleable enough to adapt to unforseen conditions.

After explaining it in this way to my audience I got a lot of nodding heads.

The question that ran through my mind during this process was “is it worth it?”. Is it worth spending the time to educate these 40 somethings on E2.0 when it’s supposed to happen organically, from the bottom-up anyway? In our inner circle we read posts like Euan Semple’s, dare I say, notorious suggestion that management do nothing and Enterprise 2.0 will happen. I agree with a lot of the points from this argument and am a believer that generation “Y” is going to catalyze Enterprise 2.0 adoption.

Despite all of that, it is worth it. I found that after the meeting, having taken the time to properly explain the value proposition and site examples of Enterprise 2.0 adoption (nobody wants to be the first for some reason), even my once oblivious audience, rational as they were, wanted to hear more and continue the exploration.

The bottom line is businesses want to innovate, they want to compete, and if we successfully relate the business value of Enterprise 2.0 to business people they will implement it.

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.

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).

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.

Within about an hour my RSS aggregator was buzzing with updates. My team started posting messages (blogging), comments and content through the Writeboard (kind of like a wiki).

“Is this Enterprise 2.0?”, I asked myself.

Not quite, but close.

Basecamp is perhaps more structured than I’d expect an Enterprise 2.0 solution to be as it’s centered around project management (the notion of “Milestone” and “TODO” seems to me to be project oriented). But the collaboration and capture of tacit knowledge elements are certainly there, and the signals, boy do I love the signals. Maybe we can call this “Project 2.0″.

Anyway, I think the folks at 37 Signals have done a great job and I’m eager to try out their other products.

I’ve found that many others within the organization have already taken strides to deploy mini enterprise 2.0 ecosystems.  When I speak with them (my allies) I feel emboldened by the possibilities and the amount of brain power that is pushing our efforts.

With the others (lets just call them non-allies), the approach has been to ensure the value proposition is properly manifested, that there’s an understanding that we want to share knowledge, innovate, and make the organization better as a whole.  The funny thing is this stuff just makes sense.  And when people get it, they push it, and that builds momentum. 

“Discoverability isn’t an after thought , it’s the core”

Enterprise 2.0 systems must be centered around Search – the ability to discover content and people.  It’s the first component in McAfee’s SLATES methodology, and “Google-like” search it is a fundamental feature that most enterprises lack.  Recent experiences have shown me that companies are eager to implement this thing called Web 2.0, but on their roadmap their first priority is making their existing content discoverable.

In my humble opinion search-centric Enterprise 2.0 systems, like Suite Two, will drive the greatest amount of user acceptance.   80% of internet experiences begin with search and there’s no reason to assume this should be any different inside the firewall, even with an Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem in place.

Reticent companies ignore the movement at the peril of their competitiveness. Within a few years, rich, collaborative software platforms that include a slate of technologies like wikis, blogs, integrated search, and unified communications will be the norm. Employees will expect to work that way, and it’ll be up to IT to solve the still significant problems and deliver.

I couldn’t agree more. In a few years this stuff will nearly be ubiquitous, especially once the MySpace generation enters the workforce. To them this is the status quo. In fact over the holidays my younger brothers (16 and 18) asked me what I was working on. I explained to them that I was working on the next generation of collaborative software like blogs, wikis social networks, and how they’d add significant value and efficiency to the enterprise. Their condescending response was “ya, what’s so special about that, we do that every day”.

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.