The way to survive — and flourish — in a tough economy is to be smarter, faster and leaner than your competition. Now is the time to explore and expand Enterprise 2.0 adoption in your organization.
We presented a community survey to crowdsource answers on Enterprise 2.0 Adoption in your company. Here are some key findings from our preliminary results:
98% of those surveyed are using Enterprise 2.0 technologies for internal communication and collaboration within their company. The most popular technologies used are instant messaging (74%), wikis and team workspaces (67%), and blogs (51%).
Despite, or perhaps because of, the economic downturn, the majority of respondents say their spending on Enterprise 2.0 will increase (58%) in 2009.
Most respondents (64%) say that adoption of Enterprise 2.0 is company-wide. Although this trend is stronger at smaller companies, it seems large scale implementations are taking place
The number one barrier to adopting Enterprise 2.0 is cultural: resistance to change (53%). Other challenges include difficulty in measuring ROI (43%), integrating with existing technologies (37%), and security concerns (31%).
Learn how to address these challenges at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference with keynotes and conference sessions on building collaborative business cultures, choosing the right technologies, and tackling security issues. Register with code CNACEB08 for 20% off a conference or workshop pass, or to receive your free Pavilion Pass.
* The survey was distributed via email to our industry lists. There were a total of 157 survey respondents as of this blog post. We will update our data as we get more results.
In the “something I never thought I’d see” department, Cisco won top honors at MacWorld last week for its new WebEx and MeetingPlace clients for iPhone, enabling iPhone users to participate in web conferences. Features vary by system, but this move reflects a couple of realities:
with little support from Apple, the iPhone is quickly becoming an enterprise device (witness earlier announcements from Avaya and IBM Lotus among others)
collaboration applications are moving into the mobile device world thanks to innovations such as Apple’s fully featured iPhone browser
This morning, the big news out of VoiceCon (news on the last day… yay!) was IBM and Microsoft’s promise to achieve true federation between OCS and Sametime. That’s good news for unified communications (although I have to side with the folks who wonder why “federation” is an acceptable solution, when “open-standrads-based interoperability” is really what’s needed). But it’s not news to enterprise 2.0 vendors and users, for whom open, shared access is table stakes. Think about it: When it comes to communication and collaboration, you can’t know in advance who you need to work with; you need to know that at any given time, you can work with anyone you choose.
IBM just announced that Global Hyatt Corporation will standardize on Lotus Notes and Lotus Sametime for unified communications and collaboration. The company, which operates in more than 45 countries, intends to offer the software to thousands of employees as well as all 365 managed, operated and franchised hotels.
In a recent Network World newsletter, I saw two headlines: “Unified Communications Solutions for 7 Cents a Day” and “Unifying Unified Communications,” a podcast discussing the fact that everyone defines unified communications differently. The 7-cents article isn’t actually about UC, it’s about UM (unified messaging): The news is that Objectworld has announced “e-mail, voicemail, messaging, and fax capabilities accessible from one interface and from any device.” The story quotes David Levy, president and CEO of Objectworld,who acknowledges “his companys approach, targeted to the SMB market, ‘is more about providing telephony than desktop collaboration.’”
As evidenced by the previous session “Social Networking and the Enterprise” (see post), many businesses can’t articulate the business reasons as to why they should be involved in social networking, yet they’re doing it or want to. There just seems to be a lot of pressure to be in social networking and it’s the “thing to do.”
Pete Fields, Senior VP eCommerce division at Wachovia, told his company’s story of the process they went through to determine the business rationales for deploying social networking across the enterprise. Wachovia ended up rolling out a comprehensive Sharepoint deployment that involved all kinds of communications, IM, group chat, chat retention, one to one video conferencing, video blogging, blogging, enriched profiles, presence awareness, and a lot more
They had a situation where they knew this communications was relevent, but they didn’t know why. So they spent time trying to figure out what’s the business case of doing this in the enterprise.
Wachovia’s business rationales for deploying social networking tools across the enterprise were:
Work more effectively across time and distance - Took travel budget to finance this social networking effort.
Better connect and engage employees - Traditionally had company sports leagues to connect with each other. They realized the virtual relationships on social networks are as real as the relationships you create on the softball team or the company picnic.
Mitigate the impact of a maturing workforce - As people get older and retire or simply leave the company, there’s a loss of knowledge assets. Social networking tools like wikis can capture that wisdom.
Engage the Gen Y worker - They come to their company with engagement off the scale. Social networking is the way they communicate in their personal lives. They’ve grown up in flat worlds, playing games with people around the world. When they start experiencing friction in the workplace that doesn’t allow them to communicate in their way, they drop off their engagement. Their world is a combination of fact and opinion, plus their participation. They need a voice. They need an outlet.
Not nearly as impactful as the first four, here are Wachovia’s last five rationales.
Position Wachovia as innovative and forward thinking
Lift general employee engagement
Reduce travel expenses
Provide employees world-class tools with which to compete for business
Support other key corporate initiatives like going paperless.
They anticipated these last five benefits, but they just didn’t stick like the first four.
Moderator, Jessica Lipnack, and panelists/blogger Patti Anklam, Doug Cornelius, Cesar Brea, and Bill Ives introduced a PowerPoint presentation-free discussion about what blogging brings to businesses. In a desire to immediately create community, Lipnack asked all the bloggers in the overflowing room to stand up, identify themselves, plus mention their blog. I made sure to stand up and announce my blog, The Spark Minute, while also mentioning that I was blogging for this conference.
Here’s a summary of the issues and points about blogging that were brought up:
A blog is a personal knowledge management system. That’s your initial audience. From that it grows to people who share your interest.
People start blogs because they’re tired of answering the same questions over and over again. It’s kind of like a personal FAQ of their knowledge, or a personal knowledge management tool. I must say that’s what I use my blog for and the point above. I’m not necessarily annoyed with questions, it’s just more efficient for me. When people bring up an issue that I’ve written about, I’ll just say, “Oh, I wrote a post about that, I’ll send it to you.”
Blogging disciplines you to collect thoughts and write them down.
Not everybody should blog, because feedback doesn’t come immediately, and people will get frustrated by it and quit. Just saying, “Let them try” is ok if you don’t have to use company resources to set them up and train them.
Micro-blogging creates more relevant connections than blogging.
Ask yourself, “What’s the business reason for writing this post” before you write.
Who should blog? Someone who is social and likes to write.
One person rightly complained that we were not staying on topic of the session title. “What does blogging BRING to business?”
So 45 minutes into the conversation, Lipnack, the moderator said that blogging can make the environment appear as a much more accessible place to work. It’s a culture change.
Regarding what does “blogging” mean to business, it shouldn’t be isolated to just blogging. It’s just a tool or vehicle. You have to find out what communications mechanism is right for your environment and objective. Blogs just happen to be a very versatile platform.
Argument against, “Who’s going to pay for their time to write the blog?”
What is it in their daily work that they need to be communicating? What are they doing now and how can they do it in a blog?
Fastest way to get your business to come around is to show the competition is doing it.
A voice doesn’t necessarily mean you have to have a blog. Don’t get hooked on the term blog. The point is to engage and have channels and avenues for staff to express themselves in the way they like. Could be a discussion board, Twitter, or a full fledged company social networking tool.
It develops an initial level of trust before you actually meet a person. Because you’re judged first on the words you write.
A blog lets you prove your expertise. Claiming expertise without it today can be difficult.
The first people I ran into at the Enterprise 2.0 conference were Tina Kulow and Dr. Willms Buhse of CoreMedia. I knew Tina when she used to do PR for Smaato, a mobile application development company for smartphones. CoreMedia develops content management systems for enterprise clients. The two of them were making a return engagement to Enterprise 2.0 in Boston because of how successful their trip was last year. They learned a lot about new communications in the social media sphere and made tons of great contacts. When the camera was turned off Willms admitted that they were able to motivate some people to participate in a book they were writing. Currently only in German, the book, “Enterprise 2.0: The Art of Letting Go” will be available in English in about six months. The book is for management types, non-bloggers, in the enterprise space and it’s got case studies form SAP, Vodafone, Nokia, and of course, CoreMedia.
I had a call recently with IBM Lotus’s Heidi Votaw, Program Director for Social Computing Software; and Jeff Schick, VP of IBM WPLC Social Software. Both are presenting at Enterprise 2.0 in a couple of weeks, and if you’ll be at the show, I recommend you attend their sessions and/or try to meet with them at the IBM booth. I’ve long felt that IBM is the leading vendor for enterprise social networking technologies, and the demo I just got only strengthens my opinion.
The Enterprise 2.0 Blog is affiliated with the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, an event focusing on social tools and technologies that help make companies more creative, agile and productive.
May 12th, 2009 |
As evidenced by the previous session “Social Networking and the Enterprise” (
