Jul 5th, 2010 |
After just coming back from E2.0 in Boston it’s safe to say that most vendors in the space (or so it seems) are moving in the same direction, towards enterprise collaboration, and when I say “enterprise collaboration” I literally mean collaboration for the enterprises, as in large companies. Which leaves me asking, “what about small and medium size businesses?” The small and medium size businesses in the E2.0 space are being under served in my opinion. It also makes one wonder if a small or medium size business has the same needs as an enterprise business to begin with. I say no.
From speaking with various companies of different shapes and sizes (and from owning a small business, Chess Media Group) I can say that while Enterprise size organizations are interested in collaboration many small businesses (and some mid size as well) are not. Again, this is an observation but it seems as though smaller businesses are more interested in business management tools as opposed to collaboration tools. The business I run works with a handful of people and the issue that we run into is that we are using multiple tools to do things such as share documents, invoice clients, email market, project manage, time track, and keep track of contacts. We don’t have trouble collaborating on things that needs to get done but we do run into challenges when it comes time to using multiple tools to run our business.
It wouldn’t make sense for many smaller organizations to use Sharepoint, Jive, Cisco’s Quad, or a host of other “collaboration” tools on the market today, but what about an overall business management tool (there are several possible candidates that I am aware of)? Something that allows me to access Gdocs, Mailchimp, Freshbooks, integrate my contacts, and do anything else I need to manage my small business from one platform/interface?
Larger organizations with hundreds or thousands of employees have specific departments that handle these tasks and their challenges are based around finding the right people and information to get their jobs done in the best way possible.
So let me ask you, are business management tools more suited for small and medium size businesses whilst collaboration tools are more relevant for larger companies? What have you seen?
Jacob is the Principal of Chess Media Group, a Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0 consultancy. Jacob also blogs on Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0, you can find him on Twitter @JacobM.
I find your options hard to compare. The two serve a different purpose. We (w24b.com) are also a small consultancy company. To my opinion the collaboration suites are very usefull to small companies like ourselves. We work together on projects (and also external participants) , but often not in the same location. So online collaboration is really an effective solution to us. The offered cloud platforms are also very scalable (read: cheap, if you are with few). Ok, the ‘emergent’ effects get better when more people use them. Business management tools, on the other hand, are allways useful. No matter if you’re big or small. Big companies just have the enterprise version and call them SAP, Salesforce or whatever.
I would go even further and ask: only for the company? Most people see collaboration as something that can only happen inside the walls or the network of a company.
But what about partners? Or existing and potential customers? In my opinion, anyone can be a partner and collaboration should be possible between people having the same interests, no matter who they are, where they are and what they do.
As an independent consultant, I collaborate with a number of colleagues on projects and also work with my clients to produce engagement deliverables. Depending on a clients security it is sometimes difficult to work behind their firewall. For me, an ideal collaborating environment would:
1. Be an environment like Google Apps that I can set up for a specific project and invite colleagues/clients to participate in.
2. Able to satisfy client security standards.
3. Able to export content to a client’s system when the work is done.
@Marcel
I suppose what I’m trying to drive at is perhaps differentiation. What makes an E2.0 tool an E2.0 tool and what makes it a business management tool. Collaboration can mean pretty much anything under the sun. I’m not sure how large your organization is but mine is a handful of people that all work virtually, our best “collaboration” tool has been skype and gdocs. Enterprise versions are often specialized, meaning you’re not going to have everyone looking at the same SAP or Salesforce dashboard (or screen). I have just found that speaking with various companies that the challenges are quite different, do you not agree?
@Gabriel
Of course great point and in fact we are seeing vendors such as Partnerpedia or Pbworks which offer collaboration platforms for specific groups of people or markets.
@John
Interesting, I agree with all of things you have outlined there but would also add business management capabilities as well.
Gabriel - indeed. Proper technology will cause the emergence of entities that don’t fit into traditional business, social, or legal categories but can nonetheless have major impact. The liberty will feel good, but it will be messy, I’m sure.
Looking for project management collaboration tool! Checkout DeskAway (http://www.deskaway.com) one of the simple yet powerful project management collaboration tool with free plans and free trials on paid plans. This really makes tasks easy & simple.
Communication needs are very different for a team and for a large organization. Facebook/Twitter-like tools are cool when you want to have at least some clue about what your 1000 co-workers are doing. Teamwork is much more intense.
We developed Flowdock (http://www.flowdock.com/) to answer those needs. We felt that the ordinary team discussions could be used to remove most of the overhead of managing your teams work.
It’s in public beta, so we’d love to hear your feedback. :)
@jacob
Thx for your reply. If you are talking about differentiation, I agree. The E20 platforms for the big companies, need to be robust. That usually has its price: less functionality, less flexibility and less integration possibilities. I agree with you that the requirements differ per company (big or small). Most social software platforms focus and compete in offering a specialized suite of functionality and less on integration with competitors.
Maybe there is a market to create a platform that only offers integration of existing best of breed products: the ’social portal’. A platform that integrates Wordpress, Wave, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Skype, etc, etc is high on our wish list. Maybe that would be a solution for you as well. We haven’t found it yet…
We’re a company of three E20 business consultants. We deliver (co-created) content. That’s our main product. Therefore we use tools like Blogs, Forums, Wikis, Google Wave etc. for our daily teamwork.
Thanks for the article. I am a young finance professional myself who recently launched a fund in Utah and I love to read about others who did the same and made it to the top. Hope to be there someday.
Thanks and Regards/-
Jason Webb
I’m quite confused with all this stuff, I hope I can get things clear very soon. Thanks for the stuff. Google
For me, the interesting point in this post is not wether small businesses can find use for collaboration platforms (they certainly can), but how to connect the data which lives in all these separate web services, social or not.
As entry barriers to using these webservices are low, this data diaspora problem will grow, maybe especially so for small entrepreneurial businesses, who are generally wary of governance on this issue.
An integration platform, as Marcel van Brugge proposes, is one part of the solution, but should be complemented with some sort of data/information strategy to be effective.