Low-cost (and stealth) Business Intelligence

Dennis Howlett on knowledge management acceptance and more:

It seems to me the obvious answer comes from using bottom up enterprise strength blog/wiki/RSS/search like say Blogtronix. SocialText, Attensa and Google. That could be a useful combination to kick start the discovery process at ridiculously low per user cost.

[…] These tools are certainly easing the information blockage overflow/problem but I accept there’s still more that can be done. The good news is that these tools deliver incremental value I can see will carry through into the future.

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Adoption Success Factors

More on the marketing side of enterprise 2.0, this is interesting:

[…] enterprise software vendors [should] focus on ease of adoption, instantaneous value and a minimum IT footprint

[…]

[…] vendors need to make it easy for users to get started and provide real value to the customer before she is required to pay. The user experience should be personalized and contextualized and the product should spread through the enterprise organically, via user recommendation, rather than by management edict.

But unless Francois I don’t think that most Enterprise 2.0 tools will remain confined to geek-heavy groups, and this for good reason, as (again) McAfee holds:

these tools will be competitive differentiators, [not just] levelers

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Marketing Enterprise 2.0

Thomas Otter offers some insight into SAPs experiences and implementation exercises with wikis (like at SDN). Yes, this is emergence in action, and yes it will probably fundamentally change how software is developed, supported and marketed.

But that he points out this post by Jeff Walker of Atlassian (“How to Ruin a Perfectly Fine Product with Marketing”) on the pros and cons of marketing is more important, because establishing these tools needs “marketing firepower” that Google and Microsoft can and will deliver:

[…] I do like both Microsoft and Google. Why? Because they are about to commoditize wikis for the masses and educate another 10 – 50 million people on wikis. In rather different ways. Wikis, which without doubt are one of the two killer apps to emerge from Web 2.0 Wonderland, along with blogs, will be spread and will benefit from the massive marketing budgets and reach of the Evil Empire and Do No Evil. (Jeff Walker)

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Collaboration Trends

This is interesting, pointing out a study and benchmark on how enterprises are supporting their virtual workforce (e.g. by shared workspaces for collaboration (real-time- and non-real time applications), some early results:

– 90% of enterprises consider themselves “virtual”, that is, they operate organizations in which team members work in separate geographic locations.
– Revenue growth and boosting employee productivity were the biggest drivers for collaboration projects.
– Demand for collaboration applications is primarily end-user driven.
– Enterprises are moving toward unifying their planning for collaboration and convergence.

and

The bottom line for enterprises and those wishing to sell into the enterprise market is that enterprises seem to understand the opportunity that collaborative applications present to improve their operations, and the demand is pull-based rather than push-based.

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IBM Enterprise 2.0 …

Leider nicht sehr konkret, ein Einblick in die Einsatzkriterien für Social Software von IBM, gefunden im CIO Weblog:

Der Reifegrad von Blogs oder Wikis wird bei uns daran gemessen, wie gut entsprechende Anwendungen die Mitarbeiter dabei unterstützen, die wichtigen im Unternehmen vorhandenen Informationen zu finden, zu verknüpfen, und zu neuen Entscheidungsgrundlagen zu machen

Eine Arena von IBM-internen Blogs, Wikis und anderen Web 2.0-Werkzeugen ist Innovationsmanagement bzw. konkret das Unterstützen von Innovation Jams:

Mit so genannten “Jams” (z.B. “Innovation Jam” oder “Company Jam”) werde sowohl die Zusammenarbeit innerhalb des Unternehmens als auch die mit Kunden massiv gefördert. Ein “Jam” ist eine virtuelle, webgestützte Diskussion, bei der “Best practice”-Ideen generiert, eingesammelt und demokratisch ausgewählt werden.

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Lotus Connections – Some Initial Thoughts

Luis Suarez promises to offer some insights and reflections into Lotus Connections, i.e. Dogear, Roller, Profiles etc.

Looking forward to it, Luis.

And yes, it’s interesting to see whether IBM will offer this as a packaged, integrated solution or if they will push this via the consulting guys? Technology issues are important, but the real groundwork must be done in implementation (and change management).

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Lessons Learned from Social Software Implementations

Mike Stopforth collects some neat advice for social software implementation projects, but basically it is aimed at fellow social software consultants. His arguments are well put forth, nothing to argue here. I understand his critique of overly-IT-focussed consultant selling well – fortunately my boutique consultancy frogpond is in no way a IT consultancy, thus I feel no guilt.

1. Social Software is not for Everyone

Despite what us Web 2.0 enthusiasts may want to believe, not every society, community and individual can find value in 2.0-ness. Some companies do fine without it and forcing a social media inplementation on a community can only get ugly. Be as objective as you can when you draw up a strategic plan or functional specification for a project. If you’re not convinced that social software can add value, walk away from it.

2. Social Software is About People

And therefore is about culture. Certain corporate cultures find it easy to integrate social software, others kick up against it. This often has to do with change management, but sometimes i’ts impossible to force (or even encourage) change. Competitive internal environments where intellectual property is regarded a personal competitive differentiator can often be difficult to penetrate in this regard. It also depends heavily on the size of the community, […]

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