Organizations today are focused on becoming more of a social business. That requires tools and software applications that will help reach that goal. Luckily for them, organizations have many options to choose from as the marketplace is filled with products and solutions to help drive and increase innovation from within. Options are great, but what about the experience each solution provides? Continue Reading »

As organizations work to transition collaboration and social pilots to enterprise-wide initiatives, architectural questions increasingly rise to the fore:

• How can we integrate with other systems?
• How do we incorporate enterprise directory structures?
• How can we ensure performance and reliability at scale?
• How can we convert features to applications?
• How can we put social applications within the flow of everyday activities?
• How much does SharePoint — present and future — really address these issues?
• How solid are all the many other vendors?
• And so on…

Continue Reading »

Social technologies are changing the ways we market and sell, that’s obvious.  But the change is not simply superficial or new ways to do the same old work.  Social — along with analytics and mobile technologies — is enabling companies to be far more knowledgeable about who they target, what messages they deliver, and even what products and messages they develop.  In short, social companies have the ability to do business better than their non-social rivals. 

But what does that mean?

Check out our track at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston on June 19^th.  It will showcase some advanced thinking about social adoption, revenue development and how companies are adopting social approaches.

Our goal for the track has been to identify and bring to our audience real thought leadership from some of the industry’s leading practitioners in a variety of disciplines.

• Gerry Murray, Research Manager, and Joe Ferrantino , Research Analyst, both from IDC will share some of their findings from very recent social research.
• Phil Fernandez, CEO of Marketo, will discuss how modern socially based marketing technologies affect revenue generation.
• Steve Adams, CEO VirtuOz will talk about how virtual agents will take on some tasks to improve eCommerce and eServices.
• Jarek Sygitowicz, CEO, Smartupz will discuss how to make the most of social graph analysis.

We are also planning a special panel discussion to round out the Sales and Marketing track.

So make the Sales and Marketing track a focus of your time at Enterprise 2.0.  You are coming aren’t you?

We’ve got an intriguing Human Capital Management track lined up for the June Boston E2.0 Conference in a business area which is starting to see enormous change after years as a bureaucratic people processing departmental silo.

Like many other industry verticals the Human Resources world is being exposed to the connecting forces of enterprise 2.0 thinking and technologies: internal social networking enabling collaboration between everyone in a company, their suppliers and associates and even customers in some consumer industries. Agile Software as a Service updates iterations, the mobile revolution and of course a rapidly changing, increasingly digital sophisticated workforce. Continue Reading »

‘Human Resources’ is an early 1960′s term but now seems pretty archaic in our ‘always on’ era of broadband and mobile networked connectivity. The needs of the people and collective cultures within enterprises continue to evolve rapidly, with increasing emphasis placed on interactions through the firewall with prospects, customers and partners being seen of value in some industries, although by no means all.

Continue Reading »

First posted on CloudAve

Oliver Marks and Sameer Patel – two of the leading lights in Enterprise 2.0 (that is experience in actually doing it rather than merely talking about it) presented this session. Their aim with the session was to move from “pontification to real world discussions” – a noble objective.

In discussing “the Big Idea” around Enterprise 2.0,the presenters pointed out that the ultimate sell comes from articulating the realistic business value propositions – Enterprise 2.0 technologies are just that, technologies. They’re not a holy grail of themselves and their needs to be a valid business case to sell the change. They cautioned attendees from comparing the business case for Enterprise 2.0 with the general Web 2.0 trends – web 2.0 is fundamentally a desire driven activity, whereas in a work setting people generally want to do their 9-5 and do what they have to do – no more.

People’s fundamental driver is “What’s in it for me?” – those trying to ease adoption of Enterprise 2.0 need to realize this and provide some sort of value to those making the decisions and end users. Understand the incentive structure in place, the politics and culture of the organization and the people within it.

In terms of the governance, risk management and compliance discussion, Oliver and Sameer recommended that this discussion happens early and happens openly. Discuss the issues and the plans at an early stage in order to (hopefully) get them onside. Explore the real reasons for negativity – is it really because of risk or is there a hidden agenda at work?

Oliver gave some examples of the ad-hoc shadow IT department that exists within many enterprises – where people faced with rigid and difficult enterprise grade software use cloud services like Zoho and Google docs in order to simply get their job done. It’s important to frame the context of the solution for management – help them understand the landscape within which the solution exists.

Joining the presenters before the break were a panel made up of Chris Mcgrath from ThoughtFarmer, Scott Schnaars from Socialtext and Tom Kuegler from PBWorks. Some points from their panel;

• Scott advised looking at the other priorities the CFO may have to balance against the enterprise 2.0 proposal.
• Chris brought up the reality that most collaborative solutions will come up against SharePoint and corporate IT will often take the perspective that collaboration happens only through SharePoint.
• Tom suggested that the only approach that was really viable was to kneecap IT in order to get solutions moving within an organization – using a bottom up approach to prove the initial concept to the business.
• Chris raised the point that you can build a fantastic collaborative platform within Sharepoint – but that you have to physically build it. Third party products enable those collaborative gains to be made more quickly then a complete design and build process.He also suggested that gains through social software tend to be serendipitous – as such it’s very hard to show a ROI pre deployment – how do you put metrics on serendipitous gains?
• Tom said that the approach really needs to be one of replacement – it’s no use going into an enterprise trying to pitch a tool which is completely different to what they currently do. Enterprises prefer like-for-like comparisons and replacements.
• Chris suggested that internal salespeople trying to pitch an idea to internal management utilize the assets of the vendors who are pitching everyday – tell them the requirements and let them help create collateral.

With getting executives on board it is critical that the requirements gathering is robust. Sameer discussed the “switching costs” involved in adopting new technology. It’s not simply the CAPEX involved in deploying a solution; there’s the business risk, the training, the deployment time etc. Ensure your proposal utilizes case studies from organizations in a similar space – make the pitch attuned to the company itself.

In terms of execution planning always be looking to mitigate the risk of the project and ensure you develop the right metrics to track expectations and actuality.

Oliver and Sameer invited Bevin Hernandez from Penn State University Outreach to tell their tale of developing sand deploying a social software offering. Their project planning document is interesting (image below and, yes, it’s the back of a napkin). For a more in-depth view – check out this post on the ThoughtFarmer site.

All in all it was an interesting session. I’ve posted before about Enterprise 2.0 and specifically the problems needing to be overcome to ensure its adoption and success – it’s nice to spend a few hours discussing more than just the shiny gadgets but an in-depth look at what can make this stuff actually happen.