Social Glass

I wrote about Clearspace a few months ago and was recently given the chance to take a second look. Clearspace is made by Jive Software, a company that appeared on the horizon in 2001 and did a lot of work with Sun Microsystems at that time. They survived the economic downturn after 9/11 and have recently emerged as a leading contender in the Enterprise 2.0 arena. Enterprise Web 2 and Dion Hinchliffe have recently written positively about Jive’s offering.

Why is Jive worth a look? Clearspace is an application that provides a cohesive set of Enterprise 2.0 capabilities including blogs, wikis, tagging, social profiles and document management. By “cohesive” I mean to point out that it’s not a loosely coupled set of disparate applications. And I emphasize document management as many corporate citizens I’ve spoken to about Enterprise 2.0 note this to be a capability that is lacking in most solutions. Document management is crucial to maturing content and innovation.

Clearspace also has an impressive “reputation generation” system (which is very customizable) and I can see a lot of relevance here when trying to create incentives for contribution. Imagine attributing a dollar value to a user’s reputation when bonuses are allocated at year end.

But perhaps the greatest feature Clearspace brings to the market is its monolithic security model. Enterprises that have invested in Directory Services (such as Active Directory) can integrate these into Clearspace and properly secure content inside the application using pre-established roles and groups. From my experience security is the number one concern around Enterprise 2.0 so this is a big selling point.

Jive also realizes that Enterprise 2.0 extends beyond the firewall to external parties (i.e. business partners). They provide an intriguing mechanism for pushing content into a SaaS cloud for temporary external collaboration, then pulling the output of said activity back behind the firewall for protection.

One downside is the seat-based licensing model. Enterprise 2.0 prides itself on organic growth and adoption, and this is hindered if companies have to buy more licenses before knowledge workers can use the system.

Jive also takes a philosophical stance on social networking, saying networking for the sake of it doesn’t add much value (i.e. how much value do you get out of LinkedIn if you’re not a recruiter?) and that we should instead focus on social productivity - the collaborative benefits one gains by being connected to people (as I understand it). Personally I think social networking has benefits in its own right, especially when we think of creating networks based on groups of interest of subject matter expertise, and I think this is likely a key component to the discovery process.

Regardless, Jive is definitely worth a look!

I’m seeing a lot of momentum behind Enterprise 2.0 in my corporate life and have been encouraged by a few recent events therein. The first involved a workshop we did with a person who’s title was “Head of Emerging Technologies and Solutions”, for, lets just say, a very large and important company, and reports directly to the “C” level. During the workshop HE TOLD US about blogs, wikis, podcasts and gave a great demo of Lotus Connections. Wow. Never before have I talked to a potential client about Enterprise 2.0 who knew more about it than I did.

The second event was less significant, but there is another large company employs person who’s title is “Catalyst of Magic”? No joke. And this person also reports directly to the “C” level and is active in evangelizing Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 internally.

I must say these are encouraging signs that the larger corporations get it.

I just read Bill Ives post about Yahoo’s endeavor into the social aspect of “social” computing. They’ve assembled a team of leaders from academia to understand (and possibly shape) the direction in which collaboration markets are heading. Notably, most of the team is comprised of non-technical folks. This is an acknowledgment that Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 is less about technology and more about human interaction.

As Paula Thornton 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.

Hear hear.

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 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.