Social Glass

Chuck Hollis, Vice President of Technology Alliances at EMC, recently chronicled their adoption of Clearspace, Jive’s social productivity solution. They called the implementation EMC One. Sam Lawrence, CMO of Jive, has summarized their effort here. It’s worth a read as it provides some enlightening and encouraging insight into how Enterprise 2.0 can work for a large company. Here are some notable observations:

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.

I’ve noticed that the ideas behind Enterprise 2.0 have remained relatively unchanged for a year and a half or so. Sure, we’ve seen the evolution of Andrew McAfee’s SLATES mnemonic to one called FLATNESSES by Dion Hinchcliffe. “SLATES” appeared in Spring, 2006, and “FLATNESSES” over a year later. Fundamentally the elements both are made up of are the same:

• 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?

(interesting now that I’m in the US I’m still posting at 5pm Aussie time)

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.

I wanted to share a great quote from a Gartner Analyst responding to CIO criticism of Web 2.0:

“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.

In a previous post I described an Enterprise 2.0 implementation roadmap. The last component in the roadmap is Enterprise Mashups. In a utopian world, enterprise mashups give the knowledge worker spreadsheet-like flexibility to dynamically create composite applications that suit his specific business needs. Companies like Kapow, Serena Software and IBM are building enterprise mashup engines, but none have reached this utopian state.

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.