Social Glass

(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.

Here’s a little presentation I put together summarizing the Enterprise Knowledge Market (EKM).

Update: http://www.slideshare.net/jgrahamthomas/the-enterprise-knowledge-market-v12.

I’d like to direct your attention to an article I just posted over at openmethodology.org called “The Enterprise Knowledge Market” (note I am affiliated with openmethodology.org through my company). It expands on a blog post I wrote some time back on the topic. The conclusion of the article provides a good overview:

As demonstrated, the Enterprise Knowledge Market efficiently discovers and exposes enterprise information assets in an effort to recognize the knowledge workers who author them. The most valuable information assets are given the most visibility. Visibility leads to recognition, and knowledge workers compete for recognition. Competition fuels participation, and participation increases the number of qualify knowledge assets at the enterprise’s disposal. This raises the likelihood that innovative ideas will be discovered, and innovation helps the enterprise remain competitive.

Update: The “recent” article I link to in fact is not very recent at all.  It was published in March, 2006.
I’m fascinated by how collective intelligence can be leveraged to produce value to the business that wasn’t harnessed before. Ideas like prediction markets and enterprise knowledge markets are indeed intriguing. And this is why I enjoyed a recent article in the New York Times called Here’s an Idea: Let Everyone Have Ideas. The article cites a company called Rite-Solutions that has built an ingenious

internal market where any employee can propose that the company acquire a new technology, enter a new business or make an efficiency improvement. These proposals become stocks, complete with ticker symbols, discussion lists and e-mail alerts. Employees buy or sell the stocks, and prices change to reflect the sentiments of the company’s engineers, computer scientists and project managers — as well as its marketers, accountants and even the receptionist.

The founders are quoted as saying “At most companies, especially technology companies, the most brilliant insights tend to come from people other than senior management. So we created a marketplace to harvest collective genius”. And so far the marketplace has been working for them. An idea from an administrative staff member lead to a contract with Hasbro, for example.

What Rite-Solutions is fantastic, but I think it could be extended to include other knowledge items that aren’t explicitly submitted to be “traded”. Why not create a discovery application that measures statistics on content items (similar to Google Analytics) to create a value index for them. Statistics about:

• Page Views
• RSS Subscriber Count
• User Rating
• Incoming Links

could be used to programmatically generate the index. This raises the visibility of content generated by authors may not have thought to submit it to the marketplace for consideration by the broader organization and provides more comprehensive coverage of potential innovative content as a result.

I recently pondered over the myriad applications and services Google has acquired and produced over recent months and realized that they are well positioned to dominate the Enterprise 2.0 market. The best way to illustrate is to give a simple rundown of how Google addresses the Enterprise 2.0 SLATES approach (I’m not going to argue the value of SLATES as I and others have done that before):

• Search: Google Enterprise Search
• Links: Page Rank
• Authoring: Google Apps for the Enterprise, JotSpot, Blogger, YouTube
• Tags (Social Bookmarking): Google Base
• Extensions: Adsense
• Signals: Google Reader, Feedburner

We musn’t forget Orkut, Google’s Social Networking application (Social Networking is one key element that is missing from SLATES), as this could easily be bundled into the commercial offering as well.

All of these applications are, or can be, converted for commercial use using either the cheaper SaaS model for economies of scale as Google has done with Google Apps, or packaged as a more expensive Appliance. In my experience larger companies feel better when they control their data, so the appliance option for them might be more compelling.

As a consumer, we already get single sign on to most of these applications. For example, when I sign in to GMail I can access Google Reader or Google Base without signing in again, and this cohesiveness is fundamental for user acceptance of any Enterprise 2.0 solution.

I also see a lot of potential for Adsense in the Extensions camp, where instead of promoting ads as one would do in the consumer world, companies will promote presentations, deadlines, important documents and highlight employee contributions using Adsense technology.

Enterprise YouTube could also significantly change the way people blog inside the firewall. Imagine your engineering team recording and uploading their status updates on a biweekly basis, or your boss sending you an email with a video message about his meeting in Shanghai yesterday, and having all of these video blogs stored in a searcheable repository.

As of now all Google really offers in the Enterprise 2.0 space is Enterprise Search (and I think Search is the first and most important element), and Docs and Spreadsheets (online, collaborative versions of Excel and Word). I’d bet money that Google will come to the market with a more compelling offering in the near term.