In an interesting twist, Ulrike Reinhard interviewed me about the Open Enterprise 2009 study:

A few weeks ago, during a busy two weeks in Europe, I interviewed J.B. Holston, the CEO of Newsgator. Despite the slight fuzziness of the video (I think J.B. needs to spring for a better webcam), his thinking was pretty sharp.

A few highlights:

• Newsgator has interated aggressively since last summer’s E 2.0 conference, where the SocialSites product was one of the finalists in the Launchpad.

• Newsgator has been focusing increasingly on integrated applications, making the company oriented more toward a platform strategy.
• The economy has had an impact on many segments that have been strong for the company, like financial services. However, even in that sector, there is a ‘harder times, so drive faster’ attitude that is leading to fast uptake in some companies.
• Large companies are finding it essential to integrate groups across the company, and also in the face of mergers and acquisitions they need low-cost, quick turn-on applications to achieve integration.
• As the world has come to see inherently more risky, companies seem to willing to accept more risk. J.B. sees less of the extended bake-offs testing and evaluating alternatives, perhaps because Web 2.0 deployments are so much smaller than SAP, for example.
• One client, with 150K seats worldwide, approximately 50% in each of two large organizations that have merged. One of the two sides had been deploying Newsgator’s SocialSites, but now they are accelerating that across both sides so that they will have a means to coordinate and collaborate right away. The ROI is obvious, immediate, and large.
• Newsgator seems to be more of a top-down adoption model, although the consumer products have established a brand awareness in the minds of users. Executive management is essential to the roll-out for large deployments like Newsgators, J.B. confirms.
• J.B. agrees that large deployments in multinational organization encounter all sorts of cultural and Cultural issues — meaning corporate and real-world cultural barriers to understanding. He goes into some detail about legal issues with privacy in various countries, as well as the importance of community managers within companies adopting these tools.

J.B.’s insights confirm many of our findings: management leadership is essential, community must be nutured, and hard times lead to strong incentives for adoption of high payoff solutions. He made a great comment, that “these are still early days, and there is no unified field theory that everyone agrees to about how to drive adoption.” Couldn’t have said it better myself, although Oliver and I hope to turn the corner on that problem, at least, as we jump into the case study side of our research this month.

I interviewed Jordan Frank, of Traction Software, recently, an old friend that I haven’t spoken to in several years. Jordan and Traction have been working with companies applying social tools for quite a long time — almost ten years — and his insights are quite interesting, and detailed.

A few highlights:

• Jordan makes a distinction between Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 as being based on individual versus group rights and responsibilities. It’s interesting that this difference is one of the key elements that I have stated for years actually define Web 2.0 social tools, where Web 2.0 social dynamics are based on the individual. From my perspective, Jordan’s distinction is not where things are headed, although it might be the case that today enterprise software is still very Web 1.0.

  Frank points out that the majority of what workers write about is work related, not about personal activities, so even though personal authorship is still primary, the contributions are oriented toward shared, or company-defined, activities or projects.

• Jordan characterizes the company’s ten year mission as being ‘page-based’ collaboration. When asked about the rise of ’streaming’, Jordan agrees that microstreaming and the asymmetric follow model of Twitter offers something new, and Traction has adopted some part of those innovations in recent releases.
• Jordan makes a great case for the ticker-toy nature of social software, where from a small set of elements — like posts, tags, groups, and so on — an amazing number of use cases can be satisfied.

Jordan describes a number of case studies that are extremely interesting (I hope they apply to our case study program), and covers some interesting sales motivations: a great interview.

As part of the Open Enterprise 2009 study, Oliver Marks and I will be reviewing case studies submitted to us, looking for the most interesting and innovative stories about companies — large or small — adopting Web 2.0 technologies. We will include the eight most interesting ones — after some further research — in our report, and we will award the most compelling case study the Open Enterprise 2009 Innovation Award. That winning company will also have the opportunity to present at the Enterprise 2.0 conference this summer.

If you’d like to participate, please fill out the form, below, on or before 22 May 2009.

Jason Rothbart is one of the founders of Groupswim, a SAS enterprise collaboration solution that debuted at last year’s Enterprise 2.0 as a finalist in the conference Launch Pad. I caught up with him recently, and explored his perspective on Web 2.0 tools adoption in the world of business.

• Jason’s title is VP of Customer Success, which I think says something important about the orientation of the company.

• Jason affirms a bimodal sales model: some clients are buying really quickly, because their “heads are on fire”, where in other cases acquisition is very, very slow because you need to get the CFO to sign off on any purchase.
• His insights on how tools virally spread through a company or top-down in enterprise-wide deals confirm what we have seen in other conversation.
• Jason points out that the there is a stake difference between clearcut returns — like increased sales — but other benefits are more nebulous: “But anyone who tells you that they can tell you exactly what the ROI is is either lying or doesn’t know what they are talking about.”

The interaction with Jason is a lot closer to the deal side of Enterprise 2.0 adoption, but that aspect of what is going on is just as revealing as the more academic and theoretical issues that seem to become foremost with practitioners.

Yammer was announced with great fanfare at the Techcrunch50 conference last fall, and David Sacks, the CEO, has had the opportunity to work closely with a large and growing list of enterprise clients since. He and I recently caught up, and the time was well spent:

A few of the insights I gained:

• Yammer was called “Twitter for enterprises, or Twitter with a business model”, he recounted, but it is evolving into a larger service with more collaborative support.

• As far as Twitter goes, David doesn’t see them as a direct competitor, since it is so geared to open discourse. Selling private areas for business discussion doesn’t fit with that model, he feels, so Twitter might not go there ever. Yammer, on the other hand, is geared to privacy as the default, which makes more sense in the business context.
• Yammer also dropped the 140 character limit that defines Twitter, and which makes sense for a consumer and SMS-integrated product.
• David points out that the buyers of technology in the enterprise market are not necessary the end users. Yammer has developed a wide range of administration tools — privacy, usage policies, user management — that appeal to the IT buyers or management. But end users really want to use web 2.0 style tools even while at work.
• Yammer supports ‘bootleg’ adoption, since anyone with an ‘company.com’ email address can start using the product, so it doesn’t require corporate sign-off, but the admin tools do.
• David has found a greater willingness by users and management to try new SAS models, which favors start-ups and leads to innovation.
• Businesses have clearly come to the realization they shouldn’t necessarily own or manage their own software, David thinks. But the hybrid, viral model that comes with a product like Yammer means that companies don’t have to make any decision about buying until it has become widely used and popular.
• Yammer seems to have an immediate impact on the way work gets done. In his experience, in traditional large companies people really don’t know what people are working on. “If you think about how tools like Facebook and Twitter allow people to remain connected with large groups of friends, and think about how that could work in business, I think its going to make companies more efficient [...] and they will have much more engaged employees because the employees will feel much more connected to their colleagues and what is happening in the company.”

While David is an unabashed evangelist for Yammer’s specific offering, I found his thoughts practical and not at all bubbling with marketing hyperbole.

Tools like Yammer represent a real turning point for business, I think, where more open social discourse (even given the privacy constraints of business) and ambient awareness become foreground activities, displacing fully closed discourse tools like email, and the batch mode mindset of org charts and monthly management reports.

I had hoped to interview Dion Hinchcliffe, of Hinchcliffe & Co, back at the recent Web 2.0 Expo, but he turned the tables and interviewed me instead. But I tracked him down this week, and spent some time talking through some issues in enterprise 2.0.

Some highlights:

1. Dion is a treasure trove of case studies, starting with a great story about wiki use spreading in AOL years ago, at the very outset of Web 2.0 adoption in large companies.

2. Regarding adoption of Web 2.0, he quotes Euan Semple, “the easiest way to do this is to do nothing,” meaning that the millenials will pull these technologies into the enterprise. He also points out that since web 2.0 tools are more conversational you have to wait for people to warm up before joining, as opposed to point-and-shoot tools like email.
3. I asked if the specific culture of companies influences adoption. He responded that we should see things that we didn’t expect to see, since these tools lead to emergent benefits. We will see a broad range of responses, since “organizations are unique, and operate in very different ways.”
4. Dion agrees that there is a bimodal division in adoption because of the Econolypse: either companies “circle the wagons” and do nothing new, or else they embrace the crisis as an opportunity to explore lower-cost, web 2.0 alternatives. He cites the Transunion case study published by Socialtext, as an example.
5. Most requested: new ways of collaborating with partners outside the firewall. He thinks that these needs for extra-enterprise collaboration are still unmet, but working “better, faster, better” within the walls of the business is still the fundamental driver for adoption.

A great discussion, and very good advice for tool vendors thinking about positioning their products in this space, as well.

I had the opportunity to interview Lee Bryant, CEO of the UK-based consultancy Headshift, and the result was a somewhat long, but extremely interesting series of insights based on his work in many enterprises.

Some of the topmost insights:

• The Economy — “People are still living on last year’s budgets,” so a lot of the momentum now is still based on last year’s decisions. He expects a point of decision for many companies in the near term, which could lead to the tail-off of earlier projects. “Paradoxically, the worst you are hit [economically] the better you come out of it.” Lee suggests that those that who accept the new economic realities quickly are the first to adapt, and may get a leap based on that.
• ROI — Some shell-shocked companies are continuing to fund large, expensive, and perhaps not that beneficial projects, while requiring highly detailed ROI analysis for a $50K experimental project, which is choking off innovation.
• The Rise of the Social Web — Lee has a great historical sense, and suggests that we are at a turning point, like the start of the industrial era. “We have our own railroads, our own telephone system,” meaning the social web, and we have a chance to reorganize our economy around new sorts of scale, new kinds of efficiency and prodcutivity. This is going to be disruptive, but will lead to an new economy.
• Change Management and Culture — Lee makes the case that the meme about people being resisting change is a bit off the mark. People are open to adopting new things if they actually help, and will resist various vacuous arguments about ‘you need to change ot die’ or psuedo-mystical mumbo-jumbo about emergent values and so on. He has found it best to position these tools in the simplest most straightforward and business-oriented way.

I found myself wishing that the conversation could have gone on longer, even though it ran over 20 minutes. Lee and I will be overlapping at several conference in the next month, and I will be sure to talk to him again.

Jeremiah Owyang, a leading social media thinker at Forrester, took some time with me to share observations about the state of practice and the future of enterprise 2.0.

A few highlights:

• Jeremiah recently found that 53% of surveyed marketers are going to increase spending on social media, despite the downturn. Companies are starting to think about the extended enterprise: “People will begin to connect more with colleagues outside the comany, and get work done with them.”

• He quoted John Schwartz who predicted that firewalls would be extinct in the near future. Legal, personal, and true secrets may be locked down, but more and more people will be using open solutions.
• Jeremiah maintains that crowdsourcing support, and other functions, will be a fruitful area. If he were still the intranet manager at Fujitsu, a former role for him, he’d be looking at that now.
• Looking at Forrester itself, Jeremiah revealed that only 18% of the company is active in one project, the in house use of Yammer as a microstreaming platform. They are seeing good productivity paybacks from remaining connected, asking questions, and getting responses in real-time. Still, it will take a while to get real support from senior management.
• Regarding microstreaming (Yammer, et al), Jeremiah thinks they are more natural to business people than blogs. He very naturally transitioned from that into a discussion about mobility and presence, which I have long considered the killer aspect of IM. He seems to think it is a killer side of microstreaming apps, as well.
• The speed of social technologies adoption has been enormously fast, and will become ubiquitous in five years, and in ten years, we won’t use the term Enterprise 2.0 anymore.

I found Jeremiah’s naming names of products to be quite exceptional: generally specific products haven’t been mentioned much. Notably, the ones we hear the most are Twitter and Yammer.

The entire experience with Jeremiah was informative, and I certainly plan to speak with him again, as we develop some deeper analysis of the sector, to get his feedback.

I finally connected with Charlene Li, of the Altimeter Group and the co-author of Groundwell, and she gave some great insights to the state of Enterprise 2.0.

• On Leadership — “The reason that leadership is so important is that this is really hard to do.’ The difficulties are so comprehensive that things won’t just naturally happen. “It isn’t just putting up a wiki or some blogs, there is a whole ‘back culture’ that has to be involved”.
• On Bottom-up or Top-Down — Charlene relates a story about Michael Dell turned Howard Schultz onto the SalesForce Ideas product, but “that doesn’t happen very often, unfortunately.” Usually, it starts somewhere else, and it won’t go vert far without an executive champion. “When you put social technologies in place it starts tearing down the way that power is shared.”
• On The Power Shift as Cultural Barrier — “When you give the power to people to post into a wiki or write a blog, [...] and if you let them do it freely, that diminshes the gate-keeper role. [...] And if you think about the way that organizations are laid out, its usually a bunch of silos, and social technologies puts a big sticl of dynamite in that.”
• On Tools — Charlene thinks that enterprise Twitter-like tools will displace a lot of email. “It supplements the natural communication already going on, like IM, which many enterprises have already adopted.”
• On Blogs — I wondered why we are finding blogs so little used. “I think its because people don’t like blogging. It’s hard to find time to sit down and compose your thoughts. [...] It asks people to communicate in a very different way. [...] I suggest to executives that they not blog, but they sure talk a lot, so I suggest they video themselves.”
• On 10 Years Ahead — “Today, working is very solitary [...] in the future it may all be in Twitter or other tools that sit on top of the social graph.”

As usual, talking with Charlene opened my head to new ideas. Definitely more than worth the time, and I look forward to returning to Charlene in the next month or so, when we are boiling down some of our results.

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