Social Glass

Shiv Sing makes an interesting point about the Microsoft investment in Facebook, where he says “What does this mean from an enterprise perspective? Quite simply that Facebook can get into the intranet market”. I couldn’t agree more. Susan Scrupski points out that Microsoft is very serious about Web 2.0 with recent deals negotiated with Atlassian and Newsgator to integrate their tools into Sharepoint.

Microsoft’s new association with Facebook will only strengthen its position in the Enterprise 2.0 space - that is if Facebook is actually willing to engage in the enterprise market. If it is, Microsoft, which is already entrenched in most of the Fortune 1000 companies, will be a good conduit through which “Facebook for the Enterprise” can be introduced. I’m going to be keeping my eye on this as it develops. Next year could be very interesting.

I was talking with a colleague the other day about a major project that had been deployed to Production a few months ago for one of his clients. The solution is a “standard” J2EE application” (EJBs, JMS, Struts, JBoss etc.) and is used both behind the firewall for CSRs and on the internet for online order handling. While it is stable, there are a few quirks/bugs with the online component. Some of these bugs are discovered by testers, but interestingly the majority are discovered by “an industry community” which details them on a forum.

My colleague said the feedback they get from this forum is invaluable and has lead to many incremental system improvements. And best of all nobody has to pay an army of testers to find these holes in the system.

Talk about leveraging the longtail for business benefit.

I read Rod Boothby’s IT Flower whitepaper today (and it’s definitely worth a read). I’m not going to comment on it at this time. Instead I’d like to highlight a guideline for successful Web 2.0 (or Enterprise 2.0) solutions:

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.

Techrigy was kind enough to give me and a few others a demo of their Social Media Manager application (SM2) which is currently in Beta. SM2 is an application designed to monitor blog (and soon wiki) posts both inside and outside an organization looking for compliance violations. It’s enterprise software designed to help the enterprise manage the new gradient of risk that’s inherent to the openness of Web 2.0.

But surely, as a compliance officer, I could manually search for corporate policy or legal violations using a search engine. So how does SM2 add value on top of Google.com (internet) or Enteprise Search (intranet)?

The answer is business intelligence. SM2 combines discovery with analysis, meaning the compliance officer is notified of potential policy violations (policies are defined in a .NET 2.0-based admin console, and SM2 ships with many policies out of the box). This helps companies enforce compliance with Sarbanes Oxley, for example, or manage issues before lawsuits are raised by detecting and correcting inappropriate use of social media.

SM2 is currently in Beta with a handful of financial services companies (which seemingly have the most to gain from being compliant). I can, however, also see tremendous value in this software for the Marketing or Public Relations department. SM2 can be used to track market reactions to product or to help gauge public image of an enterprise. I think Techrigy would be wise to expand it’s marketing approach accordingly.

The only thing Techrigy needs to work out is its pricing structure. Currently they’re contemplating a “per blog or wiki monitored” approach, which given the emergent nature of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 (with new blogs and wikis popping up every day), I don’t think this is something an enterprise would go for.

A peer of mine within my company setup an external website (based on Wordpress) for us to blog about internal matters, industry trends, what we ate last night for dinner etc. He and I are both Technical Managers and, as such, are responsible for about 10 people collectively. We asked each of these people to contribute to the site on a regular basis. Without much prodding and within about a week we managed to create a vibrant system of communication and sharing with lots of blog posts and comments.
What’s fascinating to me about all this as a Manager is the insight I get into the knowledge our new hires possess. Some of these kids, fresh out of university, are in the pocket with Web 2.0 and are able to relate it to business value - ideas like using Adobe Flex, Silverlight and Java FX to break out of the J2EE MVC rut and change the way we approach UI development and user experience as a technology organization. We talk about Ruby on Rails and one of our very junior guys has launched http://enterprise20.rubyforge.org/, an open source Enterprise 2.0 project using this technology. This insight is valuable to me when staffing projects or understanding my people’s strengths and weaknesses.

In a consulting organization we spread out, travel the world, and often find it hard to create or identify with our corporate culture. A very simple blogging application has gone a long way to create a community amongst resources working in Sydney, Melbourne, Austria and the US - all for just $8 per month. To me that’s pretty cool.