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One of the strongest and most misguided arguments expressed online and in many companies we speak with about Enterprise 2.0 is that it is not strategic.
That this collection of tools, technologies and ideas is not yet mature enough, lacks proven ROI, introduces a myriad of security and governance issues and even if successful is not a priority in today’s soft economy. It is too often delegated to IT managers to experiment with and report back in a few years.
Here’s where the difference is: Enterprise 2.0 is not a technology. It represents first and foremost a new way of thinking, interacting and communicating that includes attitude and cultural changes, empowered by IT. Is there anything more strategic than that and more important to a business future success?
It is arguably the biggest opportunity for IT driven cultural change facing organizations since the introduction of PC networks more than 2 decades ago.
One of the C suite most important tasks is to shape an organizational culture that will make their company innovative, competitive, efficient and successful not just now but in the future. Embracing Enterprise 2.0 now and guiding their employees through this transitional period should be one of their top priorities.
While in a few cases adoption started from the bottom up, a change of this magnitude usually needs to come from the top accompanied by the matching set of values and actions that prove the seriousness and commitment to change.
It requires leadership that is able to see that transparency and increased visibility into activities throughout the company will finally enable them to know what is really happening and will create a culture of trust. That openness and exchange of ideas will lead to innovation and efficiency. That collaboration will enable a diverse workforce to work together in emergent ways while being physically and geographically dispersed.
In short, it requires vision that will set a future path and will ask managers to overcome the obstacles in the way. The type of vision CEO’s need to provide and not delegate to IT managers.
The challenge and opportunity is that not many chief executives have realized yet that embracing Enterprise 2.0 is a strategic imperative and are focusing the discussion around short term ROI.
Dion Hinchcliffe at ZDNET provides a comprehensive review of the evidence and opinions regarding ROI and adoption challenges, and adds his own interesting model of collaboration cause and effect chains that while clearly provide benefits, make them harder to pinpoint and measure.
He also concludes that
“… an accumulating body of knowledge is pointing to potentially dramatic business returns with Enterprise 2.0. If these continue to be borne out, it will affect the competitive and financial positions of the companies that are proactive and therefore their long-term marketplace success“
And wonders what it will take to break the current status quo?
His colleague Dennis Howlett on the other end thinks the ROI is still years off and concludes
“As always, the secret to long term success depends on management’s ability to maintain a sustained commitment and all that goes with it. The difficulty today is that same management is wondering where the next sale comes from or how cash will be generated.”
The good news is that Enterprise 2.0 does not require large capital expenditures but mostly thorough organizational commitment. There has rarely been an opportunity for businesses to gain so much competitive edge by investing so little.
As in many cultural revolutions, by the time Enterprise 2.0 related changes start translating into business differentiators, organizations that have not made the transition will look as outdated as an organization resisting getting these useless PC boxes or adopting email.
Facebook has surpassed the BBC in the UK, and, as of November 2008, is the #13 most visited site in the United States (source: comScore.com). Although it is mostly a consumer-focused site, businesses without a Facebook strategy may be missing a key component of their internet vision.
What is Facebook?
Facebook is a social networking application that lets users keep up with their friends, and exchange photos, location updates, and thousands of other activites due to its rich application development capabilities.
Why Facebook?
Facebook has the unique position to put your company in front of millions of users, both through traditional targeted online advertising as well as grassroots popularity.
Enterprises can take advantage of the broad reach, as well as users’ social graphs, by adapting their business processes to integrate with the metadata available there.
In contrast to MySpace, Facebook is far more structured, with a rigid template and page set up allowing very little design and content freedom. Although some users may find it limiting, it does mean less opportunity for abuse. For example, users can become “fans” of or companies or products, creating fan networks, but they can’t start boycott or other negative campaigns within Facebook’s standard template.
Example: WorkLight WorkBook
WorkLight’s WorkBook, released late last year, is the first of what are likely to be many applications that integrate with users’ existing social graphs in Facebook. These hybrid applications will take advantage of the rich Facebook API, while at the same time provide integration with enterprise systems via single-sign on and a unified data architecture. WorkLight has the benefit of already having an established presence in many large companies, where adoption rate and accessibility will be critical to their widespread success across the enterprise.
Brand Awareness
Enterprises will be significantly cutting back on marketing expenses in calendar year 2009 – making it a perfect time to explore Facebook as a low cost of entry marketing platform. Major consumer brands such as Jeep, Red Bull, and Coca-Cola have already invested heavily over the past 2 years in developing content and building audiences.
Late 2008 and early 2009 will bring business-oriented users to Facebook, looking to network for leads and build brand awareness and loyalty. This may result in fostering communities of “friends”, from smaller corporate divisions like Cisco Corporate Communications on up to General Electric.
I believe that a social media campaign is a lot harder, a lot more resource intensive than many marketers realize. Starting one without the ability to maintain it, is a form of brand suicide. Like blogs whose last entry was a year ago, an abandoned social media campaign shows both a lack of understanding and a lack of real engagement. — Simon Salt, CEO, IncSlingers
“Facebook-Like” Applications
In a future blog post, we plan on exploring what I believe is more likely to occur in 2009, that is the rise of “Facebook-Like” applications inside the corporate firewall. Most major enterprise software vendors are developing or releasing products to provide functionality similar to Facebook, adapting it for use in the enterprise. Product vendors such as Socialtext exemplify the types of products we are likely to see inside the firewall in the near future.
Related Articles
The basket of technology comprising Web 2.0 is a wonderful thing and worthy of all of the press and commentary it receives, but what really scares me is the state of data in this new world. Data sits in the basement of this wonderful technology edifice, ugly, dirty, surrounded by squalor, and chained in place. It is much more fun to just buy the next storage array (disk is cheap, infinite, what power bill?), than it is to grind though it, clean it up, validate it, ensure proper governance and ontology.
What is Web 2.0 for, if not to expose more content? And data is the ultimate content. Knowing what is hiding in the basement, there are going to be a lot of embarrassed organizations (Lucy, you got some ’splaining to do!). Imagine how difficult it is going to be to link and synchronize content and data in the Web 2.0 environment. Imagine explaining the project delays and failures of Web 2.0 initiatives when the beast in the basement gets a grip on them.
Normally, the technology will be blamed. Nobody wants to admit they store the corporate crown jewels in the local landfill. Nobody will buy the new products fast enough. The server farms being built to support Cloud Computing will sit spinning and melting Arctic Ice in vain (Microsoft’s container-based approach is cool). This could seriously impact the market capitalization of our top tech giants Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Amazon. Oh no! It could crash the stock market and bring on tech and financial Armageddon given our weakened state! Even worse, my own career is at stake! The devil with them, they are all rolling in money, I could starve!
Now that I have my inner chimp back in the box, we need to put together a mitigation strategy to allow for a steady phased improvement of the data situation in tandem with Web 2.0 initiatives. It is too much to expect anybody to clean up the toxic data dump in one sitting and we can not tag Web 2.0 with the entire bill from years of neglect (just toss it in the basement, no one goes there). If we do not ask IT to own up to the issue and instead allow projects to fail, senior management, (fade to The Office), will assume the technology is at fault and will not allocate the resources needed to make this key technological transition.
McKinsey and Company released a research report last week titled “Building the web 2.0 enterprises” (free registration required). It is a global survey of about 2000 executives about the use, adoption, priorities and satisfaction with web 2.0 tools and technologies.
The summary in their words:
“Companies are using more Web 2.0 tools and technologies than they were last year, sometimes for more complex business purposes, according to McKinsey’s second annual survey on Web 2.0. Companies that are satisfied with their use of these tools are starting to see changes throughout the enterprise.”
A few thoughts and observations from the findings and from our own experience with implementing Enterprise 2.0 solution internally at Edgewater and for clients:
1. The technologies that are being implemented.
Social networking is now in second place after web services. It is not clear how social networking is defined and if the focus is internal or external. From what we’ve see, there are at least 3 different ways companies use social networking technologies:
- Internal social networking: the goal of these tools is to help people stay in contact, share activities and be able to find expertise inside the organization. From the much discussed use of Facebook as an internal social network by Serena Software to the creation of SharePoint profiles, the tools that currently exist are very limited in their support and address only what Andy McAfee calls the Strong circle, the group of people you interact with on a regular basis anyway. A true internal social network that will spur interaction and discovery across the enterprise is yet to emerge.
- Internal Collaboration: it is not on the list but internal forums and collaborative tools for projects are one of the oldest and most used aspects of an active intranet. Many may associate these activities as part of a social network.
- External social network for customer or partners. In here as well, collaborative environment and Social Network seem to be used interchangeably. There are a lot of forums, discussions and member interaction but due to their limited scope, these communities rarely develop into a full fledged social network.
The second point of interest here is the relatively low rating of some of the emerging trends like Tagging, Prediction markets and Mashups. We see a lot of interest in these upcoming technologies and expect to see them rise in priority in the future.
2. The cultural implications of adopting Web 2.0. It is good to see that in many organizations the change is not just in the tools that are introduced but also in the organizational culture and governance. 
The tight correlation between the level of satisfaction with web 2.0 tools and the degree the organization had changed indicates that they are tightly coupled. Introducing new tools to a rigid organization will result in failure. A successful implementation has to consider attitude and cultural changes as much as tools and technologies.
3. Who is leading the change: the role of IT. It is not surprising to see in the survey results that only in 16% of the responders indicated that IT had initiated the introduction of Web 2.0 tools. 
and that in the cases it did, they resulted in the lowest level of satisfaction. We’ve seen similar trends with our clients as these tools introduce chaos into the environment corporate IT is trying desperately to control and maintain. IT is responsible for keeping the security levels in place, ensuring availability, backup, searchability and integrating these services into the existing infrastructure. Since many of these tools are from open source or startup organizations, IT is justifiably playing the role of the gate keeper. A successful strategy must marry the business needs and opportunities with the prudence of a supported environment but in keeping with the agile approach that is inherent in web 2.0 – IT must be willing to give up some control otherwise web 2.0 initiatives will take too long to implement and will be too restrictive for an organization to embrace. In many cases, this is our role as strategy and technology consultants, to bridge the gap and set a cohesive strategy everyone can agree upon and execute.
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