The idea of Enterprise 2.0 is now a couple of years old, well into the trough of disillusionment as far as hype cycle position goes, and broad outlines are starting to become clear. So it is not surprising that two books have appeared in the last year that treat the subject broadly, systematically, and without the Kool-Aid that characterized books like Wikinomics, which appeared much earlier in the hype cycle. The first is one by the most usual of suspects, Andrew McAfee, titled, like his original article that coined the term, Enterprise 2.0 (the subtitle though, has changed appropriately, from “The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration” to “New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges.”)  The second is “Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom” by Matt Fraser and Soumitra Dutta.  The two books are ideal foils to each other. They tackle the left and right brains of the Enterprise 2.0 idea respectively. To a certain extent, they are also evil twins to each other. Which one is better for you?

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First published on CloudAve

I’ve been a follower of Helpstream CEO Bob Warfield since before I begun blogging. He’s a super smart, super analytical SaaS commentator who left the world of full time blogging to enjoy the rewards of corporate leadership. I’d have made this session no matter what, the fact it included a bunch of other really smart people provided further justification. Clara Shih is the CEO of Hearsay Labs, Natalie Petouhoff,- is a Senior Analyst for Forrester Research and Wendy Lea is CEO of GetSatisfaction and Phil Fernandez is from Marketo.

Petouhoff gave the analogy of cave drawings from eons ago – when all else is gone the messages remain – hence her perspective that the discussion about support has to occur at a management level. Customer service is broken and we’re in the midst of a perfect storm. years and years of terrible customer service and the emergence of social media are lead to a business transformation. Social media is a catalyst for change within an organization.

Fernandez explained that Marketo had active support from its inception – it’s an essential part of their customer support portal for both inbound and self service support contact. He gave an example of case diversion during the recent release of their updated offering. The inbound support ticket mix is changing between phone, email and web. Approx two thirds are human assisted while the remainder are self-service.

Lea talked about the Get Satisfaction freemium model and that they encourage their users to build community wherever is most appropriate for them – whether it’s on their own site, in Facebook or wherever.

Warfield explained that Helpstream is trying to combine social and process – creating a repeatable process around social interactions.

The panel discussed ComcastCares and how just showing customers that an organization cares is so important. Petouhoff talked about the fact that customer service departments are continually told to do more with less – they’re not supported in their role. Lea explained that the majority of people signing up for GetSatisfaction are doing so to use it for feedback – marketing and customer support need to be integrated. Warfield explained that the customers really want an integrated experience with a company.

Warfield discussed the concept of “deflection” where customer services aim is to have their customers NOT engage with customer services. The trick is to integrate the inbound communications and therefore have customer support become an asset rather than a cost to the organization.

Petouhoff discussed the need for openness, honesty and authenticity. The conversations are occurring anyway, it’s important for companies to embrace and engage with them. She gave some statistics about customer retention in the case of good support – it’s apparently 65% higher than otherwise.

Lea gave the example of Nike running who for $8000 per annum got a GetSatisfaction widget that has drawn huge content that is invaluable to the organization for product development. Warfield used an example of InfusionSoft who have leveraged Helpstream to capture the voice and sentiment of the community.

Lea contends that social media is shifting communications to a much more “natural language” approach – less guard and beating around the bush and more openness and honesty. Again the themes of authenticity, naturalness and honesty. Warfield concurred, saying that social media is just about people – people doing what they do in real life.

A great session with much agreement around the table…

This is the one in answer to a recent post by provocateur Dennis Howlett in which Howlett asked whether Enterprise 2.0 is in fact a crock. Moderated by David Berlind from TechWeb he had a bevvy of Enterprise 2.0 practitioners.

Therein lies the Big Lie. Enterprise 2.0 pre-supposes that you can upend hierarchies for the benefit of all. Yet none of that thinking has a credible use case you can generalize back to business types - except: knowledge based businesses such as legal, accounting, architects etc. Even then - where are the use cases? I’d like to know.

Five principles;

• Workforce transformation
• Business process/operations
• Intellectual property/Privacy/governance
• Religious wars (technology/generational biases)
• Bottom line business benefits

Greg Lowe from Alcatel-Lucent talked about their desire to unlock institutionalized knowledge and enable collaboration. Berlind asks why that desire is any different now from in the past. Lowe’s answer was that tools and technologies available today enable those aims. Claire Flanagan from CSC and Bruce Galinsky from Metlife agreed that it’s the technologies that really enable the promise of sharing and co-creating.

Berlind asks how that actually transforms the workforce. Megan Murray from Booz Allen Hamilton says this is happening no matter – expectations are higher on both the organization’s and the employee’s sides. Enterprise 2.0 technologies are enabling that to happen faster, better and more readily.

Berlind asked about the cultural change that needs to occur within an organization. Bryce Williams from Eli Lilly agreed and said that they see Enterprise 2.0 as a gateway to moving the organization into a more open approach – it’s the “starter drug” to get the organization hooked on open communications.

Jamie Pappas from EMC mentioned that Enterprise 2.0 isn’t a cure all or fix all – it’s an enabler and relies on the advocates throughout the organization to adopt it.

Much discussion about business process – have we hit the wall in terms of agility? No – it’s just baby steps and there are profound benefits yet to be realized.

Governance, there is a culture shift happening and the technology needs to keep up. One good approach can be called “participatory governance” where those who have skin in the game develop the governance models for those tools but do so in concert with the traditional governance approached.

The intellectual property concerns. All panelists agreed that organizations need to stop not trusting their employees. People are generally inherently good and those who are not will always find ways to maliciously expose data. Sure put good governance in place but beyond that trust the people to do the right thing. “I can’t stop you from doing stupid things but I can make it visible when you do them”.

In terms of the business value the difficulty is that its very hard to show true metrics for the gains that can be made form enterprise 2.0 – there are significant anecdotal benefits that need to be extrapolated to an organization-wide benefit. Booz Allen Hamilton gave an example where a 3000 employee reply-all email was analyzed and once the cost of people replying and unsubscribing was taken into account, there was an internal cost of $250000 – enterprise 2.0 can solve many of those issues. Extrapolating that up through the organization, the contention is that if a simple thing like reply-all can create such costs for an organization, high level operations can drive huge benefits.

It was very much a case of the converted preaching to the converted – it’ll be interesting to see what the originator of the title has to say about what the panelists had to offer.

First posted on CloudAve

Andrew McAfee, from the Center for Digital Business, MIT Sloan School of Management, believes we’ve reached a tipping point in terms of the acceptance of the tools and techniques of enterprise 2.0.

McAfee sees some positive signs and some danger areas - “We have the opportunity to snatch defeat out of the jaws of success”. The way that’ll happen;

• Declare war on the enterprise
• Allow walled gardens to flourish – an interesting analogy to Napoleonic land division in Paris where smaller and smaller lots were created all divided with hedgerows – let’s not go there…
• Accentuate the negative – the risks aren’t quite as bad as people make out, don’t dwell on them
• Try to replace email
• Fall in love with features - “what’s the simplest possible thing that could work”
• Overuse the word “social”

Andrew is the father of the Enterprise 2.0 term – while his shtick is getting perhaps a little tired – he’s still got a valuable voice to add to the discussion.

First posted on CloudAve

Tammy Erickson, President of nGenera Innovation Network proclaimed that 2009 will be remembered as the year of “A-ha!”. Her presentation was very much in the spirit of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. Erickson pointed out some problems impacting upon the adoption of enterprise 2.0 and the changes needed to mitigate those problems. She believes that the train is leaving the station for enterprise 2.0 but that the fundamentals need to be addressed.

Problem #1;

• Old approaches have been mastered
• Technology enables a very different level of performance
• Competition will shift the playing field

Erickson believes that Enterprise 2.0 is as game changing as the telex was in days gone by. The twentieth century icons where those who had the ability to master scale and cost. The steel mills, the auto makers. Today’s organizations are simply not optimized for the future. Reason #1 - they’re optimized with;

• Division of responsibility
• Specialization
• Strict accountability – providing excellent control

Going forwards though, enterprise 2.0 mobilizes intelligence;

• The utilization of complex knowledge
• Innovation through the contributions of many
• Harnessing the smallest units of knowledge

Reason #2 - traditional organizations are underpinned by;

• Loyalty, reciprocated with protection and care
• Individual autonomy
• Identification with organizational units and individual managers
• Based on planning

Whereas new organizations have different assumptions;

• performance based arrangements
• collective purpose
• identity with shared objectives
• they’re based upon coordination not planning

The ten factors that shift organizations – enables of collaborative capacity.;

1. Highly engaged, committed participants
2. Trust-based relationships
3. Networking opportunities
4. Selection, promotion and training based on collaboration
5. Organization philosophy supporting a “community of adults”
6. Executives who create a “gift culture”
7. Leaders with both task and relationship management skills
8. Productive and efficient behaviors and processes
9. Clearly defined individual roles and responsibilities
10. Important challenging tasks

Reason #3 – The strategic role. Today the paradigm is

• This is something we have to do to keep Gen Y happy – the recession put paid to that!
• It’s extra, nice to have like fitness centers and day care
• We don’t even know what “it” it

Contrasted with the future organization

• 2.0 supports a broad range of activities – with clear business objectives
• Each best achieves through different organizational approaches and supported by different technologies

Driving outcomes through collaborative intents;

• Connect previously unrelated ideas
• Access untapped people or expertise
• Distribute work or risk
• Co-create
• Detect emerging patterns or trends
• Pool judgments
• Determine group-wide preferences
• Air and debate multiple views
• Influence views or norms
• Coordinate in time and space

Problem #4 – The technology itself. The concerns are;

• It’s overwhelming – and difficult to harness
• The solutions are heterogeneous and disconnected
• Not secure or necessary relevant

The coming realities;

• Unifying approaches
• Ways of partitioning and aggregating data
• Ability to manage relationships

Problem #5 – Engagement

• Management 101 dictates
• Directed activities
• Clear instructions

Participation 2.0 means;

• Individual discretion
• Dealing with rich content that flows through infinite links
• Forming and maintaining complex relationships
• Having trust, a stake, a voice, an impact and a community bond

I’ve been spending some time lately with social business and collaboration consultants, Oliver Marks and Sameer Patel, discussing where we’re headed with the Enterprise 2.0 industry and the role the Enterprise 2.0 Conference plays as a catalyst for this market. Oliver and Sameer spend their days helping companies - large companies - understand how best to leverage social and collaborative tools.  But what I find refreshing in our conversations is that they move very quickly to focus on what we’re trying to achieve with these technologies and strategies.  How are we utilizing Enterprise 2.0 to achieve demonstrable and measurable results?

As an industry we’ve spent a lot of time discussing the merits of social and web 2.0 tools in business.  That’s been an important part of the Enterprise 2.0 conversation as I firmly believe that the disparity between consumer technology and business technology has largely fueled the Enterprise 2.0 market.

At our Boston conference I heard time and time again, “it’s not about the tools, it’s about adoption.”  The burning question was how to change the business culture to better utilize these tools. There’s no question that culture and adoption play a massive role in being successful with Enterprise 2.0 but there’s more to this.

What many Enterprise 2.0 experts and practitioners fail to recognize are the end results they are trying to achieve.   Yes, replacing the corporate intranet with a wiki is generally a major step forward for businesses. But the promise of Enterprise 2.0 goes far beyond that, into functional areas within the organization that can also benefit from the underlying framework, strategies and tools that comprise Enterprise 2.0.  That’s where the real value lies and that’s also the trickiest part to fully understand, dissect and integrate with an enterprise-wide strategy.

With Oliver and Sameer’s help and guidance, our San Francisco conference is going to tackle this challenge through a series of sessions and half-day intensive workshop that Oliver and Sameer will co-chair. The workshop will address how to build a business case for enterprise-scale performance acceleration - a must attend program for anyone tasked with driving a company-wide Enterprise 2.0 strategy.  The breakout sessions will look at how an Enterprise 2.0 strategy can unlock value in specific functions within business including; business partner networks; customer support and collaboration networks.

Oliver and Sameer are putting tremendous effort into this program to provide attendees with actionable information and best practices. We hope to build on this program at future events so please let us know how this resonates with your interests or suggest topics you’d like them to address:

@olivermarks

@sameerpatel

@swylie650

Further discussion on this topic from Oliver and Sameer:

Enterprise 2.0 and the Paradigm of Social Partnerships - Pretzel Logic

How To Sell Collaborative Business Performance Internally - ZDNet

By way of @ITSinsider, @tweetmeme and @elsua… I just caught this interesting slideshow on Enterprise 2.0 initiatives at Adidas Group by Christian Kuhna.  Funny that just a couple weeks ago I announced that Nike would present at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference on their internal collaboration strategy.

So it would seem that the leading Enterprise 2.0 markets are  government and, uh… shoes.

First published at CloudAve

It’s not often I agree with Dennis Howlett. The two of us have a history of going at it hammer-and-tongs in the defense of our own perspective on an issue. Sometimes it gets messy but that’s all part of the *fun*.

Recently however, in something of an “Emperor’s New Clothes” moment, Dennis posted the not-too-subtle notion that Enterprise 2.0 is a crock (of what he didn’t elaborate).

Most people interested in the space will have read the post, but the central thesis Dennis takes is that;

…business has far more pressing problems. The world is NOT made up of knowledge driven businesses. It’s made up of a myriad of design, make and buy people who -quite frankly - don’t give a damn about the ‘emergent nature‘ of enterprise.  To most of those people, the talk is mostly noise they don’t need.They just want to get things done with whatever the best tech they can get their hands on at reasonable price.

It’s a theme that, despite the historical acrimony between Dennis and myself, I find refreshingly honest, and one I want to reflect on here. Bear that thought in mind - business is full of real people doing real stuff without the time, inclination or need to wax lyrical on “the new paradigm”.

I reflected on this thought, especially given the post written by Enterprise 2.0 thought leader Stowe Boyd in response to Dennis’ polemic. In his response Stowe says that;

those things called Enterprise 2.0 form only one bit of this bigger whole. The world in which work exists has changed fairly drastically in recent years, and so we are seeing a fundamental reset in the nature of work.

And this is the point I want to come to - yes the world is changing, a fact most of us accept. But enterprise, at least at a granular, man-in-the-cubicle level, is (for the most part) not changing. And the main reason for this is not technological, not financial but rather cultural.

I occupy an interesting space in that my background is very much SMB (I own and/or manage half a dozen different businesses in different sectors – technology, property, manufacturing, professional services). Added to this background is the fact that I’ve also had a number of consulting roles for large businesses. I am therefore able to compare and contrast these two very different beasts, and parse the differences in terms of “Enterprise 2.0”.

I never cease to be amazed at the commonality between different large businesses – no matter the industry they’re involved in, no matter which part of the world they’re based, they seem to share similar traits. The people within the organizations are focused on compliance, they’re fearful of making decisions lest they be seen to be putting their head above the parapet and they’re invariably exceptionally poor at communicating – no matter how many whizz-bang “Enterprise 2.0” tools their organization has invested in. (Disclaimer - this a general comment and doesn’t reflect on current clients ;-) )

In his original post, Dennis asks what the problem is that Enterprise 2.0 is trying to solve. This question misses the point in my view – most people accept that the world is changing, that instantaneousness, collaboration, organic structures, open standards and agile development are the themes de jour and will continue to be so going forwards. This change however fails to take into account the nature of big business - despite the rhetoric and the hand waving by the select few organizations that have bought into this new way of doing things - enterprise is, for the most part, resisting change as strongly as is humanly possible. It’s almost entirely a cultural issue that Enterprise 2.0 is up against – and it’s a formidable barrier indeed.

I wrote a paper over a decade ago, in part inspired by Ricardo Semler, his book Maverick and his work within Semco, the large business he inherited. In part motivated by the belief that it is almost impossible to be innovative and proactive within a large enterprise, he set about tearing Semco apart, creating autonomous sub-organizations where the workers were often the business owners, able to sub-contract both to Semco but also to their competitors.

It’s a solution to the problem that Enterprise 2.0 is trying to solve – that is the sheer terror within large businesses of opening the floodgates, and the general trait of enterprise workers to be focused on creating a silo for information in effort to protect their own patch and, as Dennis puts it, “a protectionism on [their part] hoping they won’t be pink slipped any time soon”. Enterprise 2.0 is an incredibly valuable tool but, as yet, it doesn’t have much raw material upon which to work.

So… Enterprise 2.0 isn’t a crock at all, but until there is a new kind of enterprise that is able to leverage it, it may as well be.

I’m thrilled to announce that Bert Sandie (@bsandie) from Electronic Arts is going to present a case study at E2 San Francisco. Bert is Director - Technical Excellence (cool title) and is tasked with driving EA’s internal social networking, knowledge management solutions, collaboration and innovation. Bert spoke on a Microsoft customer panel at our Boston event and got great reviews.

Our agenda of case studies and customer speakers is growing and now includes:

• Electronic Arts
• Nike
• Booz Allen Hamilton
• Kaiser Permanente
• Medtronic
• Metlife
• Eli Lilly
• CSC
• EMC
• Alcatel-Lucent

Here is the session Bert will present in November:

Collaboration 2.0 inside Electronic Arts
The presentation will provide insight into EA’s internal social collaboration strategy, successes and failures, solution, insights, best practices. Specifically, we will look at our integrated social networking, knowledge management, community and search solution.

Bert Sandie, Director - Technical Excellence, Electronic Arts, Inc.

Congratulations Bert!

A couple of interesting data points:

• A new Pew study notes that the Interent isn’t really changing who participates in politics, but Pew notes that blogs and social networking sites are seeing growing political activity.
• Brendan Nyhan on his blog points to efforts underway to leverage social computing to improve political polling

There’s all sorts of implications here from the Enterprise 2.0 perspective, not only the potential to use social computing for data gathering, but also the potential risks of employees using their public social networks to promote political views that may be contrary to their employer.
I’m curious to hear if any companies are implementing any guidelines on how employees use their personal social networks?