Click to view larger versions

IBM

Implementing Enterprise 2.0: Balancing social networking and community with collaborative tools and services (click here to download)

KPMG

Enterprise 2.0: Fad or Future? The Business Role for Social Software Platforms (click here to download) and Tales from the Trenches (click here to download)

Nick Earle, SVP at Cisco, talks to Robert Scoble about what he's seeing happen inside the enterprise thanks to Web 2.0. Customization. Social networking. Changes to data centers and cloud computing. All that and more came up in this 30 minute interview. Earle is co-author of a book on this topic, too, called Mesh Collaboration.

COMMENT: Good interview. I think there was a couple points that will be springboards for accelerating corporate performance in the 2.0 world... take for example: collaborating on word docs for example ... I'm willing to bet that Cisco's vision is about COLLABORATION is much broader and more rich and that co-editing a doc in the cloud is almost passe. Also... ANTICIPATION (re: intellectual property, patents, etc.) is a new competitive business model heretofore not widely contemplated.

I've really become a fan of these guys.  I love their approach and the solutions they produce.

Click to read Josh's entire post

Some highlights from Forrester's research (start by looking at the right two columns):

• 91% of these technology decision-makers were Spectators -- the highest number I've ever seen in a Social Technographics Profile. This means you can count on the fact that your buyers are reading blogs, watching user generated video, and participating in other social media. Note that 69% of them said they were using this technology for business purposes.
• Only 5% are non-participants (Inactives).
• 55% of these decision-makers were in social networks (Joiners) -- despite as mature businesspeople and not college students, you'd think they'd be participating a lot less.
• 43% are creating media (blogs, uploading videos or articles, etc.) and 58% are Critics, reacting to content they see in social formats. Again the numbers are very high compared to other groups we've surveyed, and again the level of participation for business purposes is also very high.

Click here to read Josh's entire post.

Note: audio is bad until about 1:00 minute in.

In this episode of "Socialize This, "Wells Fargo's VP of Social Media, Ed Terpening, discusses how the bank is using a blog (The Wells Fargo-Wachovia Blog at http://blog.wellsfargo.com/Wachovia/) to share details of the upcoming merger between Wells Fargo and Wachovia.

Data persists.  Information has a shelf life.  Actionable insights are time critical.

Data is raw material.  Information are components.  Actionable insights are the final consumable goods.

Data is mined.  Information is gathered and aggregated.  Actionable insights are assembled with varying degrees of expertise and delivered within a specific context.

The efficacy of actionable insights are dependent upon the quality of the raw material; the completeness of the underlying components; and the skill and knowledge of the knowledge worker responsible for final deliverable.

In future posts, we'll discuss how Enterprise 2.0 can improve the "Information Supply Chain" within Global 2000 organizations.

"Information Supply Chain" is copyright Quick & Associates, LLC.

Web 2.0 tools present a vast array of opportunities—for companies that know how to use them.

FEBRUARY 2009 • Michael Chui, Andy Miller, and Roger P. Roberts

Click here to read entire article.  Following are highlights:

Research by our colleagues shows how differences in collaboration are correlated with large differences in corporate performance. Our most recent Web 2.0 survey demonstrates that despite early frustrations, a growing number of companies remain committed to capturing the collaborative benefits of Web 2.0. Since we first polled global executives two years ago, the adoption of these tools has continued. Spending on them is now a relatively modest $1 billion, but the level of investment is expected to grow by more than 15 percent annually over the next five years, despite the current recession.

Management imperatives for unlocking participation

To help companies navigate the Web 2.0 landscape, we have identified six critical factors that determine the outcome of efforts to implement these technologies.

1. The transformation to a bottom-up culture needs help from the top. Web 2.0 projects often are seen as grassroots experiments, and leaders sometimes believe the technologies will be adopted without management intervention—a “build it and they will come” philosophy. These business leaders are correct in thinking that participatory technologies are founded upon bottom-up involvement from frontline staffers and that this pattern is fundamentally different from the rollout of ERP systems, for example, where compliance with rules is mandatory. Successful participation, however, requires not only grassroots activity but also a different leadership approach: senior executives often become role models and lead through informal channels.

At Lockheed Martin, for instance, a direct report to the CIO championed the use of blogs and wikis when they were introduced. The executive evangelized the benefits of Web 2.0 technologies to other senior leaders and acted as a role model by establishing his own blog. He set goals for adoption across the organization, as well as for the volume of contributions. The result was widespread acceptance and collaboration across the company’s divisions.

2. The best uses come from users—but they require help to scale. In earlier IT campaigns, identifying and prioritizing the applications that would generate the greatest business value was relatively easy. These applications focused primarily on improving the effectiveness and efficiency of known business processes within functional silos (for example, supply-chain-management software to improve coordination across the network). By contrast, our research shows the applications that drive the most value through participatory technologies often aren’t those that management expects.

Efforts go awry when organizations try to dictate their preferred uses of the technologies—a strategy that fits applications designed specifically to improve the performance of known processes—rather than observing what works and then scaling it up. When management chooses the wrong uses, organizations often don’t regroup by switching to applications that might be successful. One global technology player, for example, introduced a collection of participatory tools that management judged would help the company’s new hires quickly get up to speed in their jobs. The intended use never caught on, but people in the company’s recruiting staff began using the tools to share recruiting tips and pass along information about specific candidates and their qualifications. The company, however, has yet to scale up this successful, albeit unintended, use.

At AT&T, it was frontline staffers who found the best use for a participatory technology—in this case, using Web 2.0 for collaborative project management. Rather than dictating the use, management broadened participation by supporting an awareness campaign to seed further experimentation. Over a 12-month period, the use of the technology rose to 95 percent of employees, from 65 percent.

3. What’s in the workflow is what gets used. Perhaps because of the novelty of Web 2.0 initiatives, they’re often considered separate from mainstream work. Earlier generations of technologies, by contrast, often explicitly replaced the tools employees used to accomplish tasks. Thus, using Web 2.0 and participating in online work communities often becomes just another “to do” on an already crowded list of tasks.

Participatory technologies have the highest chance of success when incorporated into a user’s daily workflow. The importance of this principle is sometimes masked by short-term success when technologies are unveiled with great fanfare; with the excitement of the launch, contributions seem to flourish. As normal daily workloads pile up, however, the energy and attention surrounding the rollout decline, as does participation. One professional-services firm introduced a wiki-based knowledge-management system, to which employees were expected to contribute, in addition to their daily tasks. Immediately following the launch, a group of enthusiasts used the wikis vigorously, but as time passed they gave the effort less personal time—outside their daily workflow—and participation levels fell.

Google is an instructive case to the contrary. It has modified the way work is typically done and has made Web tools relevant to how employees actually do their jobs. The company’s engineers use blogs and wikis as core tools for reporting on the progress of their work. Managers stay abreast of their progress and provide direction by using tools that make it easy to mine data on workflows. Engineers are better able to coordinate work with one another and can request or provide backup help when needed. The easily accessible project data allows senior managers to allocate resources to the most important and time-sensitive projects.

Pixar moved in a similar direction when it upgraded a Web 2.0 tool that didn’t quite mesh with the way animators did their jobs. The company started with basic text-based wikis to share information about films in production and to document meeting notes. That was unsatisfactory, since collaborative problem solving at the studio works best when animators, software engineers, managers, and directors analyze and discuss real clips and frames from a movie. Once Pixar built video into the wikis, their quality improved as critiques became more relevant. The efficiency of the project groups increased as well.

4. Appeal to the participants’ egos and needs—not just their wallets. Traditional management incentives aren’t particularly useful for encouraging participation. Earlier technology adoptions could be guided readily with techniques such as management by objectives, as well as standardized bonus pay or individual feedback. The failure of employees to use a mandated application would affect their performance metrics and reviews. These methods tend to fall short when applied to unlocking participation. In one failed attempt, a leading Web company set performance evaluation criteria that included the frequency of postings on the company’s newly launched wiki. While individuals were posting enough entries to meet the benchmarks, the contributions were generally of low quality. Similarly, a professional-services firm tried to use steady management pressure to get individuals to post on wikis. Participation increased when managers doled out frequent feedback but never reached self-sustaining levels.

A more effective approach plays to the Web’s ethos and the participants’ desire for recognition: bolstering the reputation of participants in relevant communities, rewarding enthusiasm, or acknowledging the quality and usefulness of contributions. ArcelorMittal, for instance, found that when prizes for contributions were handed out at prominent company meetings, employees submitted many more ideas for business improvements than they did when the awards were given in less-public forums.

5. The right solution comes from the right participants. Targeting users who can create a critical mass for participation as well as add value is another key to success. With an ERP rollout, the process is straightforward: a company simply identifies the number of installations (or “seats”) it needs to buy for functions such as purchasing or finance and accounting. With participatory technologies, it’s far from obvious which individuals will be the best participants. Without the right base, efforts are often ineffective. A pharmaceutical company tried to generate new product ideas by tapping suggestions from visitors to its corporate Web site. It soon discovered that most of them had neither the skills nor the knowledge to make meaningful contributions, so the quality of the ideas was very low.

To select users who will help drive a self-sustaining effort (often enthusiastic early technology adopters who have rich personal networks and will thus share knowledge and exchange ideas), a thoughtful approach is required. When P&G introduced wikis and blogs to foster collaboration among its workgroups, the company targeted technology-savvy and respected opinion leaders within the organization. Some of these people ranked high in the corporate hierarchy, while others were influential scientists or employees to whom other colleagues would turn for advice or other assistance.

When Best Buy experimented with internal information markets, the goal was to ensure that participation helped to create value. In these markets, employees place bets on business outcomes, such as sales forecasts. To improve the chances of success, Best Buy cast its net widely, going beyond in-house forecasting experts; it also sought out participants with a more diverse base of operational knowledge who could apply independent judgment to the prediction markets. The resulting forecasts were more accurate than those produced by the company’s experts.

6. Balance the top-down and self-management of risk. A common reason for failed participation is discomfort with it, or even fear. In some cases, the lack of management control over the self-organizing nature and power of dissent is the issue. In others, it’s the potential repercussions of content—through blogs, social networks, and other venues—that is detrimental to the company. Numerous executives we interviewed said that participatory initiatives had been stalled by legal and HR concerns. These risks differ markedly from those of previous technology adoptions, where the chief downside was high costs and poor execution.

Companies often have difficulty maintaining the right balance of freedom and control. Some organizations, trying to accommodate new Web standards, have adopted total laissez-faire policies, eschewing even basic controls that screen out inappropriate postings. In some cases, these organizations have been burned.

Prudent managers should work with the legal, HR, and IT security functions to establish reasonable policies, such as prohibiting anonymous posting. Fears are often overblown, however, and the social norms enforced by users in the participating communities can be very effective at policing user exchanges and thus mitigating risks. The sites of some companies incorporate “flag as inappropriate” buttons, which temporarily remove suspect postings until they can be reviewed, though officials report that these functions are rarely used. Participatory technologies should include auditing functions, similar to those for e-mail, that track all contributions and their authors. Ultimately, however, companies must recognize that successful participation means engaging in authentic conversations with participants.

Received the following via my weekly email subscription from McKinsey Quarterly (read their "Inventing the 21st-century purchasing organization" article here).  The exhibit shows how one European manufacturer achieved €100 million in savings within nine months by creating more than 50 cross-functional purchasing teams organized around spending categories.  Is this an area in which Enterprise RSS can add significant value?  Very possibly.

Rethinking the Purchasing Function, McKinsey Quarterly
"Goods and services can represent 70 percent of all a company’s costs. Yet many companies treat purchasing as a backwater; pay little attention to securing the best talent for the job; cling to a traditional mind-set that focuses on saving money for specific items rather than on overall costs; and mostly ignore the potentially large role of procurement in implementing strategies, innovating, and improving performance. Top performers, by contrast, view purchasing not only as the commercial conscience of the organization but also as its competitive eyes and ears.

The exhibit shows how one European manufacturer achieved €100 million in savings within nine months by creating more than 50 cross-functional purchasing teams organized around spending categories. Led by purchasers and including key people from engineering, manufacturing, and marketing, the teams worked on developing products and optimizing processes, not just on purchasing in the narrow sense. Beyond the immediate financial gains, this approach helped to counter the confusion that ensues when one group focuses on costs while another tries to innovate.

As an early round investor, here's the top ten list of what I want from Enterprise RSS:

1.  To solve a set of targeted, specific business problems (not the amorphous "information overload")
2.  To deliver quantifiable business value to customers
3.  A large, readily accessible market
4.  An easily identifiable buyer (or group of buyers)
5.  A coherent go-to-market strategy
6.  Repeatable sales processes that scales
7.  Predictable, profitable revenue growth from solution sales (software and services)
8.  A broad base of channel partners to extend market reach
9.  An "open source" approach to add value to the solution
10.  A clear exit strategy

| View | Upload your own

The web is abuzz about Forrester's prediction of a $4.6 Billion Enterprise 2.0 market by 2013.

Dennis Howlett at ZDNet makes an excellent contrarian observation that requires serious consideration:

"It is when Forrester strays into the collaborative workspace that I believe they’re over reaching. They make the implicit assumption that major players like IBM and Microsoft will subsume Web 2.0 software into existing collaborative offerings. They argue that a combination of factors such as commoditzation, legacy and the marketing muscle of the incumbents will serve to make Enterprise 2.0 products “fade into the fabric of enterprise collaboration.” Apart from the difficulty in getting adoption, to which I have referred elsewhere, I believe this is solving the wrong problem."

The overall point is interesting, but I'm inclined to disagree with Dennis' underlying thesis that E2.0 is focused on solving the wrong problem: 

"Collaboration is about problem solving in the flow of business processes - or at least it should be. That’s where cost sits and where all the automation in the world will not rescue the business manager. Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t solve problems per se but it may serve to expose them."

Actually, McKinsey & Company published a paper that compares and constrasts Transformational, Transactional and Tacit work ... and highlights the contributions each make to the U.S. economy and impact on corporate profitability.

In an article entitled "Competitive Advantage From Better Interactions" The McKinsey Quarterly 2006 article, Volume 2, (premium membership required) the authors illustrate the top and bottom line impact that can be achieved by optimizing Tacit Interactions and this is likely to result in significant competitive advantages.  Summarizing:

Employees engaged in highly collaborative, complex problem solving activities produce some of the greatest impact on a company’s profits.  These activities are know as Tacit Interactions.  Knowledge workers involved in these activities are the fastest growing segment in the enterprise: 41% in the U.S. and 45% in the U.K..  Running supply chains, managing customers and partners, negotiating acquisitions, or selling to the enterprise are among just a few examples. The old strategies for efficiency improvements don't apply to employees whose jobs mostly involve Tacit Interactions; instead, a company must boost these workers' productivity by making them more effective at what they do. As a result, the company will build talent-based competitive advantages that are difficult for rivals to duplicate.

"Executives must learn how to compete, innovate and manage in an era where Tacit Interactions dominate and drive performance."

Transactional work is certainly a mainstain in the modern enterprise.  And E2.0 may indeed optimize those processes.  But it's more likely that E2.0 will make the greatest impact on ad hoc collaboration - ala Tacit Interactions. 

I had the pleasure of visiting with Bruce Sheer, founder of FutureSight Consulting, yesterday.  I was thoroughly impressed with the completeness of their vision and their ability to execute.

Bruce was kind enough to share how FutureSight is helping technology companies sharpen their value propositions by articulating business value through beautifully executed  microsites and interactive ROI calculators.

But their story goes much deeper than that.  The firm has pulled together all the right elements to deliver extraordinary value to their B2B clients.  FutureSight's services span the gamut from insight-driven marketing strategies to superlative design work and rock-solid delivery capabilities. After reviewing a cross-section of their client list, it's clear that FutureSight already is a world-class firm.  It's only a matter of time before it becomes the dominate player in B2B Marketing.

From "Better Projects" :

"An important aspect to the role of the business analyst is communicating... The clichéd line about the BA being a translator between IT and The Business is a clue to the importance of communication in the requirements management process."

My reply:

"You're right on point. Communication is key. I'd also add that the role of BA is changing and growing in importance... evidence this summary I received from Forrester today:

"Everyone agrees on the importance of the business analyst role, but few know exactly what it is that business analysts do. In truth, there are two main types of business analyst: business-oriented and IT-oriented. But with the move from information technology (IT) to business technology (BT), the distinctions between these breeds of analyst are blurring. Many business analysts will continue to specialize in one or the other of these domains, but a new breed of business technology analyst will emerge to play a new role implementing changes to business policies directly within supporting software."

Forrester's world view matches my own experiences.

There is an emergent role within the enterprise; for those analyst/strategists who can not only communicate, but see the bigger picture; span the continuum between strategic and tactical; find hidden connections; bring order to chaos and help IT and Business deliver transformational value to customers and shareholders alike.

Microsoft's Rapid Economic Justification Framework is used to evaluate the business and financial impact that an IT initiative will deliver.  It goes beyond the traditional Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis and recognizes that IT investments can also play a more strategic role - such as driving new revenues. 

"The Microsoft Rapid Economic Justification (REJ) Framwork defines the value of an IT initiative as a business performance improvement that is aligned with the organization's critical success factors (CFSs), and that enables the organization to make optimial use of its resources with the context of acceptable risks."

But perhaps more importantly, it seeks to establish a shared vision between business and IT; facilitate sound business planning; and, promote effective communications between stakeholders.

"REJ goes beyond building bridges between IT managers and business executives: the REJ process enables 'fusion,' a plan for IT managers to keep business critical success factors and key performance indicators (KPIs) in mind by using the common language of economics to demonstrate how IT investments can benefit a business." 

More later in Part II. 

Post and comments from Burton Group EAP Blog: 

 
Right on point.  I'd add there is an opportunity to explore an emerging roll (or department) that serves to unify IT and Business... and is focused on driving innovation in the context of strategic business drivers. 

I'm reminded of some of the core concepts of the Catalyst.

Mike Rollings at The Burton Group posted this today which underscores why clients place a premium on Business Technology Providers who are fluent in technology, operations and finance and can span that continuum.

"In the April 3rd APS blog post “Spanning the layers”, Chris Haddad (Vice President and Service Director for Application Platform Strategies) asks “does thinking about business and IT alignment trigger brain buffer overflow”?  He states that during the Burton Group Institute Service Oriented Architecture Workshop sessions last week, the audience was quiet when the discussion focused on how to measure business value, but discussions about technology topics were more animated.  This seems to be a recurring theme associated with enterprise architecture and the justification of IT investments.

IT professionals continue to focus on the design and engineering aspects of technology adoption and seem to forget that technology is only relevant in relation to the business value it provides."