The Promise of the Real Time Web for the Enterprise

Real Time Web is the latest trend to capture the media’s attention over the past few months, and indeed seems to encapsulate well the effect that Twitter and the social networks are having on the flow of information. The ability to get up-to-the-second information about people, news and activities around the world is a foundation for a new wave of startups and services and is being integrated into search and other services.

As many users of the real time web will attest, its constant stream of information can be overwhelming and disjointed but at its best, it allows awareness and insight to emerge as the confluence of information takes a clearer shape.

Can this be useful in the enterprise? (I’ll be careful about using the term “The Real-Time Enterprise” that Gartner coined a few years ago; it means something else).

Companies generate huge amounts of data that rarely sees the light of day. Let’s consider the following scenario – you are an account manager for several key accounts in a particular vertical. What information are you getting? Most likely direct and indirect emails consist of 90% of the information while the rest is verbal, non-documented conversations. But what if you could get real-time updates on the following:

• Client specific news
• Client brand related blog posts, discussions, videos and tweets in real time
• Vertical news
• Client services updates about milestones reached
• Customer support alerts about open service tickets and their resolution status
• Internal discussions and email regarding the client
• External email communications with the client by different team members
• Etc..

Not all of these would constitute information that someone will send a specific email on. Being aware of the stream of news, discussions and information can be invaluable for an agile and responsive approach.

Our current document and email centric information systems are not built to provide this level of constant details. Using the new generation of web mashups and aggregation tools are beginning to offer reasonable solutions.

As Jennifer Martinez had recently observed in GigaOm, there is a huge potential for tools that will help sift and provide context for all of these huge streams of data.

What surprises me is that most of the discussion looks at this as a new phenomenon while there is an industry that has been using this method very successfully for a long time. The Bloomberg (and other) terminals provide bite size financial information in a continual stream that can be filtered, sorted and analyzed. It combines company news, industry news, transactions, price changes, etc., in a way that for a novice seems indecipherable but for the experienced broker is a goldmine.

Providing the right tools are put in place, the potential business value seem significant:

• Accelerating cycles of decision making
• Pushing all relevant information to you rather than pulling from multiple sources is a great time saver
• Decreasing the unbearable email load
• Increasing and broadening awareness to domain knowledge

For more information on the real time web and the type of tools that exist around it, ReadWriteWeb has compiled a great list of top 50 real time web companies and services.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2009 – What’s New?

It was interesting to visit the Web 2.0 conference last week and see the progress and trends compared to my last year impressions.

Here are some of my thoughts:

• SharePoint is the de-facto standard for Enterprise 2.0 While other vendors have compelling products and features, a CIO that is looking for an internal, comprehensive, secure and maintainable solution has almost only one choice (unless you are on an IBM stack..). Other tools focus on providing point solutions, hosted environments, plugging current SharePoint holes and extending functionality. Microsoft had the biggest and most impressive presence and were heavily promoting the next version SharePoint 2010 that will be launched in the SharePoint conference in October. (Some preliminary details here).
• The field has definitely matured over the last year. There are more case studies and research about usage, benefits and trends although most companies are not sharing explicit ROI numbers. Some vendors have disappeared while others are growing and establishing themselves at a level where they may be considered long term players and safe for the enterprise.
• The experts are still frustrated with the slow rate of adoption and the seeming growing gap between the prevalence of social tools and technologies used by marketing and sales to communicate externally Vs. they almost complete absence internally. The rapid adoption of tools like Facebook and Twitter for customer communication not just in retail but in Healthcare and other industries creates glaring discrepancies where the same companies have no tools internally and sometimes even block their own marketing teams from external use of these tools under some outdated IT policy.
• IT is still not part of the discussion. That is unfortunate because as Steve Wylie, the conference director expressed in a guest post at ZDNET last week, large scale adoptions will not happen without IT.

  “While we could argue that this is a very new market and that businesses take time to change, I also believe that Enterprise 2.0 will be challenged by large-scale adoption until corporate IT is fully on board.  Early adoption has been largely driven by business users and department-level managers.  They had a problem to solve and were fed up waiting for IT to provide the solutions they needed.  They took matters into their own hands by finding workable, web-based solutions and even celebrated this new found freedom from IT.  With a few exceptions, IT took a reactive posture to Enterprise 2.0 and viewed it as a threat to be managed, secured and even blocked in some cases.”
  

• Tactical view. One of the most frequently asked questions was “what is the best way to get started?”. The pretty universal answer for vendors and corporate users was to approach it in a tactical manner and find a specific business problem you can solve using collaboration tools. Be it an HR portal to boost morale, tools to help virtual project teams work more efficiently, sales best practices portal or any of many other ideas. Define a narrow business case and implement. So far, trying to approach this in a strategic manner makes finding ROI a herculean task and as noted above, puts IT on the defensive. I hope that this trend will start to change as these tactical solutions rarely provide long term sustainable benefits.
• Rise of the Community Manager. The most active forum was the one where the newly created function – community managers shared their challenges and tricks for getting people to take part in the social activity. First, It is great to see that many leading organizations have realized the importance of such a task although many had it as a secondary responsibility they volunteered to do rather than a full time position. Creating and maintaining a vibrant and active internal community requires skill, passion and process and the focus should rightfully be as much on that as on the tools that enable the community.

Additional impressions:

Enterprise 2.0 2009 Conference: Aggregate and Organize

Enterprise e-Commerce on a Shoe String Budget?

Image courtesy of Flickr

While inexpensively built and operated mom and pop e-commerce websites are as common as snow in New England in January, is it possible to build and operate an enterprise grade e-commerce site on a shoe string budget? E-commerce at an enterprise level is not simply slapping a shopping cart to your website and calling it e-commerce enabled. The demands of an enterprise solution may require:

• Integration with legacy systems
• Integration with supply-chain systems
• Support for multiple currencies and tax codes
• Multiple store-fronts
• Profile and history driven offer management
• Integration with a content management system
• Business user control over promotions and pricing
• …and more

Challenges of integration with existing systems alone are daunting enough never mind the fancy e-commerce functionality that is often considered vital for competitive differentiation. No wonder why starting an e-commerce venture or an upgrade is considered a seven figure expense. The cost of an enterprise grade e-commerce product alone can easily account for twenty to forty percent of the budget. The other option is to go with a hosted or SaaS based approach and avoid capital expense for software and infrastructure – not a bad approach for testing the waters but in the long run, charges and fees can really add up.

A well executed e-commerce site can provide great returns on the investment by generating new revenue streams, enhancing existing ones, or reducing operational expenses – and that can’t be too bad for the budget or your career. However, in tough economic times the challenge becomes harder as getting approval for large complex projects becomes difficult and even the approved budgets can get slashed. If your budget gets cut, is there a way to still implement enterprise grade e-commerce? Can an open source e-commerce solution be the answer to the “do more with less” mantra? Is open source e-commerce ready to play with the big boys in the enterprise domain? Let’s explore these questions and the capabilities of the open source e-commerce solutions.

Let’s start with a common misconception that an open source e-commerce product requires significant customizations and the cost of customizations more than offsets any savings from not having to pay license fees. Implicit in this assumption is the notion that a commercial product requires little or no customizations. However, the real-world experience shows us that this is not the case. Even the best commercial products cannot be used out-of-the-box unless you decide to adopt their look and feel and their model of e-commerce. The cost of customizations can add up just as rapidly in a commercial product as they can in an open source one. Therefore a prudent approach would be to adhere to the industry standards and best practices and use out-of-the-box functionality in areas which are not competitive differentiators. Heavy customizations should be limited to the aspects of the website that are true differentiators and result in a unique user experience. This guiding principle applies regardless of the decision to use an open source or a commercial product.

There are a lot of inexpensive and open source e-commerce products out there; however, most of them are nothing more than a simple shopping cart. They are only suitable for the most basic needs of a simple web site. However, Apache OFBiz and Magento are two promising contenders that break from the pack and compete in the enterprise space. In this article we will primarily focus on OFBiz.

Apache OFBiz is actually an integrated suite of products that does not only include e-commerce capabilities but also provides support for accounting, order management, warehouse management, content management and more. An enterprise e-commerce implementation cannot exist as a point solution. It has to integrate and work well with other back office processes and applications. OFBiz’s integrated suite can be used to automate and integrate most back office functions. Even if you decide not to use the built-in functionality it can still be integrated with other existing systems albeit with more effort and cost. It provides enough e-commerce functionality out of the box to match most enterprise needs and the rest can be customized if needed. Here is a summary of our assessment of OFBiz:

Technical Capabilities

#	Criteria	Rating	Comments
1.	E-commerce capabilities	B+	Provides Robust e-commerce capabilities OFBiz e-commerce capabilities include: catalog management, promotion & pricing management, order management, customer management, warehouse management, fulfillment, accounting, content management, and more.
2.	Sign-on and Security	B	Granular and robust security framework The OFBiz security framework provides fine grain control of the security including multiple security roles and privileges. Roles can be used to control access to screens, business methods, web requests (URLs), and/or entire applications.
3.	Technical flexibility & ease of use	B	Very flexible but complex  OFBiz is an application development platform that can be used to build applications and as such provides a tremendous amount of flexibility.  The use of the entire framework (which includes the database, an Object Relational Mapping (ORM) layer, business object layer, scripting support, and UI tools) is optional.
4.	Integration with other apps and locations	A	Multiple integration methods  OFBiz business services can be exposed as services and accessed by multiple methods including Remote Method Invocation (RMI) and XML Web Services.  Integration directly with the OFBiz Relational Database is also possible.
5.	Scalability	A	Highly Scalable  Java systems are highly scalable provided a production architecture that is designed to support heavy load.  A load balancing device and redundancy at the web, application and database servers can redundancy and scalability.
6.	Relational database integration	A	Support for all major database platforms  The most popular OFBiz database platforms are PostgreSQL and MySQL (both of which are open source).  OFBiz has also been tested with Oracle, DB2, Sybase, and MS SQL Server.  The default installation uses an Apache Derby database which is not recommended for production use. Our research indicates some problems with MS SQL Server database – this should be investigated further prior to selecting that database platform.
7.	Skill Set to support	NA	OFBiz framework and application are based in the following technology components: XML Web Development: HTML, CSS, AJAX/JavaScript, Apache Java Development: Java, JSP, Freemarker, BeanShell, Tomcat application server (possibly) Database Development and Administration: MS SQL Server (possibly), SQL, JDBC Long term support of the application would require knowledge and familiarity in each of these technology sets.  While these technologies are mainstream and skills should be readily available in the future, skills and experience with the OFBiz framework that is built upon these technologies may not be.

Business Position

#	Criteria	Rating	Comments
1.	Financial stability	B	OFBiz is a “top level” project in the Apache Software Foundation.  The Apache Software Foundation provides support for the Apache community of open-source software projects. The Apache projects are characterized by a collaborative, consensus based development process, an open and pragmatic software license, and a desire to create high quality software that leads the way in its field.
2.	Maturity of product suite	B	Open For Business (OFBiz) was initially launched in 2001.  In early 2006, the project went through the Apache Foundation’s “Incubation” process to review projects for quality and open source commitment.  OFBiz was promoted to a top level Apache project in December 2006.The community for OFBiz is very active.  The major web posting board receives between 20-40 postings per day relating to OFBiz.  The original contributors are very active in monitoring these sites and sharing knowledge.
3.	Reference Accounts	B-	Total number of installations is unknown due to the nature of open source software. The OFBiz websites lists more than 70 companies that use their software. However, there are very few marquee names.

Implementing an enterprise e-commerce solution can be expensive and complex process that requires analysis and investment in people, processes, and technology. While it would be insincere to say that an enterprise e-commerce solution can be implemented on a budget in the ballpark of a mom and pop e-commerce store, the budget can be significantly reduced by:

• Carefully crafting business requirements
• Adapting the business model to match industry’s best practices
• Reducing and carefully planning data migration and application integration
• Keeping the customizations to a minimum
• And using an open source e-commerce platform

OFBiz provides a viable open source e-commerce stack that can be used to implement enterprise grade e-commerce. When combined with good implementation practices and solid execution the combination can result in slashing costs by twenty to forty percent — which sometimes can make the difference between getting funded or getting shelved.

Building a Collaborative Enterprise: Facebook

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

• What’s in your [Corporate] Facebook?
• Facebook and Building Brand Awareness

Web 2.0 for Insurance Questions and Answers

I wanted to follow-up the IsoTech08 conference and the talk I delivered there on Web 2.0 and Insurance with answers to a few questions that came from the audience.

The full presentation slides are posted on slideshare:

Web 2.0 in the Insurance Organization

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: agent_collaboration agent_engagement)

Questions and Answers:

Q: the new trends in the innovative use of the web seem to give direct insurers an advantage over indirect ones, as they focus a much larger portion of their resources in direct to consumer services and marketing. How can traditional agent centric companies compete?

A: Do you remember the end of real estate agents? When Your Home Direct launched with a website and a 2% commission structure everyone mourned agent based companies. It appeared that agents do provide value and the 2% became 3%, then 4% and now chapter 11. Remax is still going strong…

Agents provide a personal relationship and value that is appreciated by many customers. Companies can empower these agents with the latest tools and technologies that will allow them to provide their customers with the best user experience and convenience that will provide the best of both worlds.

The direct providers like Geico, provide tools but no context or tailoring to the client specific needs. Agents should be provided with a white label set of tools (tools that the Insurer provides but can be customized with the branding, contacts and products that a specific agent provides). When providing a quote, it is not a printed document but a link to a personalized client site with all the details of the quote listed and the ability for the client to make changes and see options. Agents can communicate through messages or live chat and provide all the options and discounts.

The Customer gets a completely customized experience guided by a trusted agent.

Insurers that will empower their agents with tools like these will not have a problem to compete successfully.

Q: It was mentioned that one of the largest hurdles in the successful implementation of social and collaboration tools inside the enterprise is lack of critical mass of users. How can we ensure that we reach the critical mass and what will drive adoption?

A: It is true that for any community to be lively and for any communication tool to be effective it needs to reach a sufficient number of people. There are few ways to help that happen:

• Cultivate the core user group. The ratio is usually 1:9. For every one contributor you have 10 readers and commenters. The contributors form the heart of the community and need to be encouraged and rewarded
• Put collaboration tasks within the line of business. Collaboration and social tools are often considered “above the line” or things you do above and beyond your regular work. If an organization can find ways to put the use of these tools in the regular course of doing business, their usage will become just part of doing your job. Examples can include posting files and not emailing them, soliciting feedback through a forum, not in an email etc.
• Make it the social norm. if key activities happen there, and key executive post and conduct business in the internal social network, it will become the place to be. People will start asking each other if they saw a specific thread or comments and will drive up adoption.

Q: Can you provide an example where Mashups provide a solution that can not be addressed using other existing Portal, BI ,EAI and Dashboard tools?

A: As with any new technology, people are justifiably concerned that the hype is exaggerated and that it is just a fancy term for well implemented dashboards. The new class of tools called Mashup engines try to solve some of the fundamental problems of integrating data from multiple sources and providing it in a visual interface without the need to go though the extensive and expensive effort of actually integrating the applications and their data. By leveraging web services standards, each source of data or data driven service can be assembled quickly and provide unique insights and different way to look at data that was very difficult until now. Here are a few scenarios:

• Dynamic view of the customer. We often talk about a 360 view of the customer with all their claims, policies, history, and in multiple lines of business. A customer mashup can take a customer record as a baseline and pull together a combination of structured and unstructured data with visual rendering. For example, if the client is company X, the company view can include:
  • Company information and price stock
  • Map of company locations
  • List of latest news from news services about the company
  • List of SEC filings
  • Existing policies with their value and renewal dates
  • List of open and recent claims
  • List of recent service calls

  The data comes from multiple sources and can quickly change but the dynamic nature of the mashup, allows sources to be added or removed quickly and for different data to load based on retrieved parameters

Image taken from: http://www.andybudd.com/presentations/dcontruct05/images/zen2.jpg on April 21, 2008.

Web 2.0: Rumors of My Death Are Greatly Exaggerated

Sometimes it is a good idea to step back and think after reading the breathless reporting on the Great Left Coast Technology Shows, TechCrunch 50 and Demo Fall . What is most interesting is some of the ensuing analysis.  For example, this piece basically says Web 2.0 is dead, because the offered Web 2.0 innovation was yet another photo site, friend network, etc…  Even Web 2.0’s death is old news.  During November 2006, Web 2.0 was considered as much as dead to be superseded by Web 3.0  (ugh!!! I haven’t got Web 2.0 straight yet).

What is going on?  How can I even remotely look intelligent as a technologist going for budget or capital to work with Web 2.0 technology?  Dead, not dead, no wait it is Web 3.0.  This would make anybody think the IT profession as a whole was psychotic for even suggesting a value proposition incorporating Web 2.0 technology within or without the company.

Perhaps a different view would help put all of the noise in perspective.  After recently reading “Engines that Move Markets: Technology Investing from Railroads to the Internet and Beyond” by Alasdair Nairn, one can apply the lessons learned from past cycles of technology adoption to that of Web 2.0.  While technologies such as railroads, electric lighting, and automobiles are dissimilar, they all tend to follow the same cyclic steps.  One of those early steps is the rise of copycats or “me-too-ism”.  Everybody wants to jump on that gravy train with biscuit wheels, and hopes to tap into the investment cash stream moving into the new technology innovation.  By gauging where you stand step-wise in the cycle you will know when and where to invest.  So in this case Web 2.0 is not dead, it is merely signaling a move to the next stage.

The next stage will be corporate and organizational adoption, not necessarily the next great consumer Web site.  The consumer space has been the lead innovation ground for the Internet, with corporate and organizational use trailing.  So the consumer space is moving to the later consolidation phase for Web 2.0, while the corporate and organization space is beginning innovation and adoption.  Just the announcements by IBM for a social collaboration lab and Oracle for their Beehive initiative show the value of using this cyclic model as a lens for evaluation.

Now is really the time for corporations and organizations to begin to consider adoption of Web 2.0 technology with implementation studies and pilot programs.  The potential productivity gains and first mover benefits will be huge for those who can begin the cultural changes necessary.  Because the technology drives more of a cultural and organizational change than a true technological change there is little benefit to waiting for the technology to be “perfected”.  Instead, the organization’s culture needs to adapt to best practice in collaboration and analytics driven evolution, and where people are concerned it takes time to adapt and assimilate.

Image courtesy of gapingvoid.com

McKinsey Enterprise Web 2.0 Research – Adoption Rate Increases

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.

This content is the property of Edgewater Technology and is published as part of the edgewater technology blog. Any unauthorized use of this content is prohibited.

Putting Enterprise 2.0 Solutions in Order

A visitor walking the demo floor at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference would find it hard to define what all these companies and product offerings have in common and what qualifies them to be categorized as Enterprise 2.0 solution providers.

While vendors of organizational social networks are a clear fit, what is common to advanced search vendors, enterprise mashup providers, Content Management vendors and video broadcasting solutions?

It seems that the common thread is a shared vision of the future enterprise as a social, open and collaborative place where data, content, knowledge and expertise are more easily available and where productivity results from enhanced collaboration and information sharing.

We can categorize the solution areas based on what they allow the user to do:
 

Finding information and data across silos and systems is still the holy grail of today’s information systems. Our information workers are dependent on their access to information but the ever growing amount and complexity of the data makes it harder and harder.

Most basic Enterprise 2.0 products cover the first 4 levels. They include a basic search for content within the network, provide tools for creating new content, sharing, and collaboration using technologies like discussions, wiki’s, blogs, RSS, Public Profiles, and groups.

Products in this category include: Microsoft Sharepoint, SocialText, Telligent , Thoughfarmer and GroupSwim among many others.

The fifth level offers a unique opportunity to leverage the interactions, conversations and links to add context and intelligence. By using Tags or by auto detection of terms and traffic patterns, some of the solutions can help create a layer of relationships and meaning on top of the content and link together disparate pieces of content, data and people for a complete picture.

Products in this category include: OpenWater, Connectbeam, Inquira

The 6th level in our stack consists of tools that try to bring together and connect data from disparate systems and source and allow the user to connect them and create custom applications and views on demand. By using open standards and web services, these tools called Mashups attempt to simplify our search for information across multiple systems by allowing us to pull from them without creating a separate datamart as the baseline for data and correlation.

Mashups are a hot topic for enterprise portals and enterprise web 2.0 initiatives. IBM, Oracle and Micosoft are releasing mashup tools as well as a few smaller vendors like Jackbe and Serena

At the final level, we would all like to have a toolset that will allow us to discover ideas, bring important knowledge to our attention, alert us in real time to activities and trends we should be watching, feed us in real time information that is relevant to the tasks we are performing. No tools in this category yet but check again in a few months…

The ROI and game changing benefits of Enterprise web 2.0 internal implementations can go well beyond important outcomes like of employee involvement, morale and collaboration. It would come from harnessing the intelligence, context and knowledge within the organization (data, content and people) and outside sources to increase productivity, shorten development lifecycles, enhnace relationships make better decisions and inspire innovation.

Leveraging Enterprise Web 2.0 for competitive advantage

What is Enterprise Web 2.0?

For the last 3 years, web 2.0 and social networking have been all the rage in the Internet community. This is where the VC money is going, the media attention is focused and users are spending much of their time. Businesses are still trying to figure out what does it mean for them. Applying web 2.0 principals and attitudes to business and the enterprsie can be called enterprise web 2.0

Many tend to think that becoming a 2.0 organization as the use of flashy interfaces, communities, blogs, wikis and user generated content and tried to jump on the bandwagon by adding these to their sites without comprehending the deeper and more fundamental cultural changes that make these tools effective, and have seen little gain.

Web 2.0 is about attitudes and a new way of interaction with all constituents, customers, employees, and partners.

 

With all its hype, cool startups and sexy conferences, web 2.0 still baffles many business people who see it as a playground for kids (MySpace, Facebook, YouTube) or a get-rich scam for young entrepreneurs and VC’s. Many who have been through Bubble 1.0 would rather wait until the web 2.0 fad disappears to see what is left standing. Tim O’reilly has provided what many see as the most comprehensive definition of web 2.0. And while his explanation is very thorough, it is also technical in nature.

 

My favorite definition comes from Ian Davis who wrote:

“Web 2.0 is an attitude, not a technology. It’s about enabling and encouraging participation through open applications and services. By open I mean technically open with appropriate APIs but also, more importantly, socially open, with rights granted to use the content in new and exciting contexts.”

In my opinion, web 2.0 is indeed defined as an attitude that can be personal or organizational. A web 2.0 organization adds specific terms and values to its code of conduct and sets priorities and incentives to promote them.

We see web 2.0 attitudes, or what I like to call the web 2.0 spirit, as made of the following attitudes:

• Open: you don’t have to share your source code to be open but from the application to the users, the approach is open. Easy to integrate with, easy to add to. Built on Sharing. Open to new ideas, Flexible, Agile, Simple, and Diverse.
• Interactive: the interaction among users and active participation is a core element of Web 2.0. The ability of customer and partners to respond and engage in discussions, post reviews, comments, thoughts and ideas. Agree and disagree. Provide a different point of view. Support and promote.
• Transparent: Do not hide, lie, spin, manipulate, threat, or intimidate. The Internet walls are nonexistent and everything you say or do, internally or externally will be exposed. Therefore: Share as much information as possible, acknowledge mistakes, and explain decisions.
• Collaborative: Listen, encourage opinions and group decisions. True collaboration is a tremendous thing producing a result much greater than the sum of the parts. It can only flourish in a nurturing environment.
• Social: Web 2.0 is about building relationships, trust, playing well with others, give and take, respect of each player and of the social order that is in place. Social corporate responsibility, caring about the environment and about the local community are very important as well.

 

Andrew McAfee at Harvard likes to add the term Emergent, noting that out of many local interactions as web 2.0 facilitates, comes higher level structures. I’ll expand that definition to include emergence of order and structure out of the seemed chaos that is online interaction. It is the transcendence of web 2.0 communities that created Wikipedia.

 

What can be gained?

Enterprise web 2.0 promises substantial incentives for early adopters:

• Enhanced brand image, exposure and buzz. As influence circles expand, using new methods for communication and data distribution will reach an ever expanding user base.
• Improved customer relationships and increased loyalty. Customers will appreciate the new approach that respects and listens to them.
• Faster feedback cycle and agile response to market opportunities. By providing real avenues for customer collaboration and listening to chatter and monitoring usage, companies can create faster release cycles and quicker response methods.
• Improved utilization of internal creativity and innovation. When employees at all level are engaged is collaboration and discussion, great ideas and solutions can quickly surface, get reviewed and implemented
• Better lead generation and inbound traffic. Beyond search, activity in the social web can be a great source of traffic and referrals.
• New business channels. Whether it is finally establishing a DTC channel to leveraging social commerce applications, the new landscape provides new opportunities and new potential partnerships.

Adoption Challenges:

So now, show of hands. Has your organization embraced the web 2.0 spirit? Chances are that unless you are working for a web 2.0 startup, the most you have seen is the introduction of a limited corporate blog or a Wiki’s coming up on your intranet.

Many companies have a deep rooted problem with the web 2.0 spirit. It contradicts some of the fundamental principles of corporate mentality and therefore risky to undertake. In my experience very few companies have truly bought into this attitude and at the most are paying lip service by implementing some basic enterprise 2.0 applications to replace their failed and unused Intranets and KM systems.

Bob Warfield provided a very insightful discussion as to the reasons companies are wary of embracing web 2.0:

The headlong rush the Web brings to expose everything to everyone scares the heck out of most corporate types. Their two biggest requests for Web 2.0 initiatives are Governance and Security, and the reasons for it are exactly what we’ve been discussing. It isn’t just that they have “control issues”. There are sound business reasons why controls have to be in place.

Morale: Do we really want everyone to know how poorly some initiative is going? How will it help to tell those who can’t make a difference and would only be depressed by the knowledge? Is it fair to expose some internal squabble that was mostly sound and fury signifying nothing? Won’t that just unfairly tarnish some otherwise good people’s reputations and make them less effective?

Governance: Is the information legal and appropriate for everyone to know in this age of SOX and Securities Laws?

Competitive Advantage: Do I want to risk giving my competitors access to key information because I’ve distributed it too broadly?

Still, the web 2.0 spirit as reflected in the actions, habits and expectations of users WILL impact the way companies do business. Some of the most important trends include:

• Loss of control: as mentioned above, companies no longer have absolute control over their brand, products and services and how they are portrayed. From rumor sites to product reviews and fake commercials, people have many more ways to learn about you and form opinions.
• Opinions matter. 68% of shoppers read products reviews before making a purchase.
• Wider influence circles. Information (good and bad) can quickly spread through influence and social circles.
• Transparency is expected and recent cover-up attempts by companies like Merck and Bear Stearns were not tolerated.

Companies will have to adapt because the old practices are getting them in trouble and new opportunities for leadership position are being lost due to lack of clear web 2.0 corporate strategy or what we would call enterprise web 2.0

By embracing the new enterprise web 2.0 paradigm, businesses can create long lasting changes that will truly resonate with audiences beyond the quick fix of adding a marketing blog to the web site and some promotional videos. As these changes take time to implement, early adopters and market leaders can create a significant competitive advantage by differentiating themselves and reaping the benefits.

Let us know what you think