Tag: e2conf

Enterprise 2.0: Case Studies Part II

Today started out with another panel — seems to be the more common format for breakout sessions here rather than individual speaker. I was a few minutes late and came in on someone from a vendor that I hadn’t heard of talking about his product, then Joe Schwartz of WebEx took over to talk about how they’re doing Enterprise 2.0 internally using their own technology. Because they have large operations in China, they need to be able to collaborate across a wide geography, for which their using their core web conferencing/desktop sharing product, but also leveraging blogs, podcasts, RSS feeds and other mechanisms in their outward-facing marketing. He also mentioned how they use social networking in the sales organization using tools like LinkedIn and Visible Path.

Because of the nature of their business and the fact that so much of their business is sold remotely, their sales force is really focussed on enhancing their virtual presence and touch-points. This is the first time that I’ve really heard about how social networking can make a difference for the sales side of the house; most case studies focus on inward-facing projects and people, or on the customer community in a post-sales scenario. They use a tool called SalesGenius, integrated with their CRM, to help with this; in fact, since it’s a hosted service, the sales department started it on a trial basis without IT even knowing about it. Even now, there’s no IT involvement, and a relatively low monthly cost gave them almost an immediate ROI.

Next up was Jeff Herrmann of Manning & Napier, an investment management firm, about how they implemented blogs and wikis internally using the SocialText platform. They already had a fairly collaborative culture, especially in their analytical team, but they had a problem with just capturing and retrieving knowledge (in part because of the relatively high turnover in personnel that is endemic in the industry), with communicating information between departments, and with facilitating virtual and asynchronous discussions. Funnily enough, he found it easy to get buy-in at the bottom (people who probably weren’t being heard, and saw this as an opportunity) and the top (executives who had the vision to understand how social networking could make their business work better), but said that he’s still working on the middle. And surprisingly, the most prolific blogger in the firm is the 71-year-old chairman.

We then heard from Maria Barnum of Bank of America on how they’re using RSS to distribute information out to their branch network: this is one-way notifications of everything from weather alerts to fraud notices, and used to be done by faxing or remote printing. They’re using a blog tool to publish information, since RSS is built right in, and categories allow for easy filtering of the feeds by region and role. They use a small RSS reader that sits in the system tray that alerts the user when a new item is available; essentially, they’ve created an alternative to email for distributing this type of information, which is a pretty interesting application for RSS. They use ActiveDirectory to determine that information and push specific feeds to specific people; I’d love to hear more about how they do that, since that’s an essential part of using RSS technologies in some enterprise applications. Someone asked what blog and reader technology that they are using, and Barnum said that she was not allowed to do product endorsements; I don’t think that the conference organizers intended that she not even mention the product name (after all, the previous speaker mentioned SocialText explicitly).

I consider RSS to be the next big thing in information distribution, and I’m actively paring down my email newsletter subscriptions (which I almost never read) in favour of RSS subscriptions, which assures that my email address isn’t getting spammed. I also think that RSS needs to be used much more heavily to deliver alerts and other information from enterprise applications: it provides a standards-based way to send out information that can be consumed on a variety of platforms.

Enterprise 2.0: Jive Software

Whenever I attend a conference as press, as I am at this one, I receive a lot of requests for meetings with vendors while I’m at the conference. I had so many this time that I had to turn some down, and they keep coming in even while I’m here.

Today at lunchtime I had my first vendor interview with Matt Tucker, CTO of Jive Software. Jive makes an collaboration product in two main flavours: Clearspace, for enterprise collaboration, and Clearspace X, for community collaboration. Although based on the same platform, they have a few differences in functionality, such as reporting, and the pricing models are different: $29/user/year for the enterprise version, and internet-type user band pricing for the community version.

I really like the standard interface because it treats all content types — blog posts, online documents, wikis and discussion threads — the same, and combines them in the “What’s New” section. There’s a shared tagging structure between all of these types of content, so it’s really topic focussed rather than having the focus on content type that many enterprise social software suites have.

It has the expected functionality of RSS feeds everywhere you look (person, space, thread, or a specific piece of content), as well as email notifications for the old skool types who haven’t figured out RSS yet.

The company heritage is as the creator of discussion forum software used by 1,800 customers, including Apple (for their discussion groups) and SAP. There are migration tools to move from the old product to Clearspace, and a few customers are starting to migrate; there are approximately 25 customers on Clearspace today since its release five months ago, although not all of those are conversions from the old product. Although they have a project in the works with a university that will expand to 10,000 users consisting of faculty, staff and students, their largest active customer are in the 200-user range. VMWare is one prominent customer that is in the process of moving from the old platform to Clearspace for their community discussion forums.

The technology is Java on the back end, running on Solaris, Linux, Windows, OS/10 and probably your toaster; any application server; and eight (if I heard the number correctly) different databases. Although a few customers consume it as a hosted solution, most are taking it in-house and customizing it for their own use. Although Jive’s professional services group does a lot of the customization, apparently a savvy development group within a customer may also do the customization with a minimum of training.

In the future, they’ll be adding on more per-user personalization, such as content filters and views; they’ll also be adding more lightweight document approval workflow functionality, such as deadlines. This is the second vendor that I’ve talked to today who has mentioned workflow/process management in the context of a true Enterprise 2.0 product, and I know that there will be more interesting developments in this area.

Enterprise 2.0: Case Studies, Part I

Another panel, this one with moderator Brian Gillooly from Optimize, and including panelists Jordan Frank of Traction, Mark Mader of Smartsheet.com, Suresh Chandrasekaran of Denodo, Todd Berkowitz of NewsGator and David Carter of iUpload (which I understood was going to undergo a name change based on what their CEO John Bruce said last month at EnterpriseCamp in Toronto). Since these are all product companies, I expect that this might be a bit less compelling than the previous panel, which was primarily focused on two Enterprise 2.0 end-user organizations.

I’m not going to list the details of each vendors’ product; suffice it to say that Traction is an enterprise wiki platform (although there’s some blog type functionality in there too), Smartsheet.com is a spreadsheet-style project management application offered as a hosted service, Denodo does enterprise data mashups for business intelligence applications (now that’s kind of interesting), NewsGator is a well-known web feed aggregator and reader, and iUpload is a hosted enterprise social software service.

Mader had some interesting comments on how by making updates to a schedule completely transparent, no one wants to be the last one to add their part since everyone will know that they were last; this, however, is not unique to any Enterprise 2.0 functionality, but has been a well-known characteristic of any collaboration environment since Og was carving pictures of his kills on the community cave wall.

There was an interesting question about who, within an organization, is driving the Enterprise 2.0 technology adoption: although the CxO might be writing the cheque, it’s often corporate communications who’s pushing for it. In the last session, we saw that in one organization, it was pushed by HR, but I suspect that’s unusual.

Enterprise 2.0: Reports from the Frontier

First after lunch is a panel that includes Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps from NetAge, who I saw present this morning, plus Sujatha Bodapati of ProdexNet (an IT services company with a large Indian offshore development lab) and Carole Boudinet of Volvo IT (which doesn’t make cars, but provides IT services such as SAP customization within the global group of Volvo companies), discussing more on the people side of Enterprise 2.0.

Stamps started out with a case study about Shell wherein they put the technology in place for collaboration, then had to develop new ways of working together in order to develop the internal networking skills. Boudinet continued on with information on how they developed a collaborative environment and culture at Volvo with global virtual teams, once the technology was in place to support such collaboration.

Volvo, as customers of NetAge (ah, the focus of this panel becomes clearer…) developed 10 keys to virtual team collaboration:

  1. Be organized
  2. Plan ahead
  3. Show respect
  4. Be clear
  5. Seek confirmation
  6. Dare to ask
  7. Give response
  8. Seek understanding
  9. Address problems
  10. Resolve conflicts

They developed a virtual team guide and exercises on getting started with virtual teams, and developed an iterative rollout process including assessment, coaching and exercises, then moving on to implementation of the tools and rules. They’ve developed a network of “culture ambassadors” who promote the Volvo culture and help people to adopt the culture.

An audience member asked how this helps Volvo do its job better, and it turns out that they can now gather ideas for their various manufacturing processes from participants around the world throughout their organization. This has helped them to save money by tapping into knowledge that already existed within their company.

Sujatha Bodapati then talked about collaboration challenges in their organization, with major operations in both the US and India, resulting in internal issues of culture, geography and time zones. They use email for customer and HR interaction, when a document trail is required; message boards and wikis for individual projects and technical details; online chat for quick clarifications and real-time collaboration; and web conferencing and desktop sharing for formal meetings, brainstorming and prototyping sessions, debugging, and technical support. I found this last bit to be a particularly good layout of how to use multiple communication channels depending on the type of communication required: very similar to the presentation that I heard from Craig Roth at a recent conference. ProdexNet uses a number of different processes for virtual team collaboration, including regularly-scheduled meetings and informal phone conversations, and encourages smaller team sizes of 5-7 people.

Besides talking about ProdexNet’s internal collaboration, Bodapati also talked about how they’re building a product for NetAge, and how during the entire 19-month project there has been no face-to-face communication between them: in fact, she just met Lipnack and Stamps yesterday for the first time. She sees excellent written communication skills as a key to this type of collaboration, since Stamps apparently wrote an incredibly clear set of product specifications ProdexNet to work from. They used BaseCamp for technical team collaboration, and online chat for development and debugging details. Since I often work with clients remotely, I agree that this can be done as long as there are clear communications, no resistance to using the technology required for collaboration, and a corporate culture that is open to virtual team collaboration. I have worked with many clients where we execute projects flawlessly without ever meeting face-to-face; on the flip side, I’ve had local clients who I met with several times per week but who couldn’t get past their own corporate politics and power games to allow collaboration to occur.

She stated that the bottom line to a successful virtual teams is the human interaction and attitude: willingness to take the time to communicate clearly, to have flexible work hours for time zone overlap, to travel when necessary for face-to-face interaction, and to use the right tools at the right time. An audience member asked how you “enforce willingness”, which I found pretty funny.

Lipnack finished up the session with a case study from an unnamed global financial services company, and how they developed collaboration across their global teams. They married sociology best practices with enterprise wiki technology, driven by the HR department — how’s that for three concepts that don’t often end up in the same sentence? The final result, based on before and after surveys, was a pretty impressive 34% increase in virtual collaboration.

Enterprise 2.0: Dennis Moore

We finished the morning with a keynote/general session by Dennis Moore of SAP, who gets points for making us laugh within the first 30 seconds. We still seem to be covering a lot of the basics of Enterprise 2.0; maybe that’s to be expected given the newness of the meme, although I would expect that most of the people here probably have a bit of knowledge about Enterprise 2.0 — they’re at an Enterprise 2.0 conference, after all.

He also discussed how the boundaries between work and home are starting to dissolve, in part because we’re bringing our expectations from our souped-up home-based computers and networks into the more restrictive corporate IT environment. Not satisfied with what IT can provide, business units are buying externally-hosted services via a software-as-a-service model, and building their own portals using RSS feeds.

As I’ve mentioned here before, he talked about how SAP has exposed much of their product functionality as web services so that those services can be consumed by other applications — whether a structured BPM application, an enterprise mashup or a portal — to provide visibility into the data and functionality of SAP. This makes SAP a vital and essential part of the ongoing environment rather than being relegated to the dreaded “legacy” category.

He demonstrated (finally! A live demo!) a nice “smart workspace”, essentially a portal environment with all of the SAP service-enabled functionality available for dropping into any of the containers in the environment. He actually poked fun at how SAP or one of their partners might take months/years to create a custom application that you could now create yourself in their smart workspace.

Enterprise 2.0: Derek Burney

We heard from IBM, so it’s inevitable that we’re going to hear from Microsoft too: namely, Derek Burney, GM of the SharePoint Platform and Tools group. More stuff on how we’re in a new world of work, how technology is changing how and where we interact, but he also touches on the issues of the need to retain and share knowledge as the baby boomers start to retire, and what the incoming MySpace generation is going to demand in terms of functionality on enterprise platforms.

He covers the idea of a busines productivity infrastructure consisting of unified communications, business intelligence, ECM, collaboration (including wikis and blogs) and enterprise search — amazingly, that’s exactly what SharePoint offers 😉 He mentions BPM peripherally as it relates to content approval, but doesn’t cite it explicitly. He does mention “workflow” but that’s really Microsoft’s view of workflow, which is more web service orchestration than what I think of as workflow.

He discusses all the people who might be involved in some way in your organization — employees, partners, customers, and non-affiliated community — and how to better allow collaboration between, not just within, these groups. He directly addressed the concern that many IT (and business) managers have about bringing blogs and wikis inside the corporation, namely a loss of productivity, by showing an example from within Microsoft of how wikis can actually improve productivity, but I think that the Razorfish intranet example that I saw at a recent conference is much more compelling.

The presentation dragged a bit towards the end: I was losing the thread as the slides blurred past, and the guy beside me appeared to nod off. I would like to review his slides if they’re available online; I think that there’s a great deal of good information in there, I just need to dig it out.

Enterprise 2.0: Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps

Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps of NetAge shifted gears away from technology by talking about the personal side of networks and organizations: their company focuses on organization change, particularly that required to make organizations more transparent. Although it’s not identical to the presentation that they’ve delivered here today, there is a presentation linked from their home page, Collaborating in the Networked Organization, that has a a bit of the same content and is interesting on its own.

Networks can be public or private, and can be for purely social or business purposes. From an organization standpoint, networking within teams requires new principles, behaviours and tools, establishing the four common principles of purpose, nodes, time and links. Adherence to these priniciples provides consistency when working in online spaces, essential if online networking is going to work in a corporate environment.

They finished up with a poem written for them by Robert Muller, former Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, called Decide to Network.

As an aside, Lipnack and Stamps work completely collaboratively on stage, effortless passing the conversational ball back and forth.

Enterprise 2.0: Marthin De Beer

The first session after the morning break is Marthin De Beer of Cisco’s Emerging Markets Technology group, speaking about how video and other Web 2.0 technologies are changing the enterprise. Like many of the speakers that preceded him, a lot of his material is pretty introductory, like explaining how social networking is being used, and what a mashup is. He talks a bit about the social phenomenon of the blending of social and business personas and functions, which I find to be an interesting topic: many young people start out using goofy pseudonyms on the first social networks that they use, but gradually move to having a public persona that includes both personal and business aspects of their life.

Unsurprisingly, he sees user content creation as transforming the very nature of content creation, and is being driven by consumer/home access to products and technologies including highspeed internet access, high-resolution video capture and peer-to-peer sharing. Whether it’s a consumer, business or service provider doing the content creation, it’s like to include some combination of social networking, collaboration and entertainment.

Yikes, more video clips with technical problems, although this one was really just a few-second clip. Ironically, the audio was clipped off at the end, removing the word “all” from the tagline “video shows it all”.

Well, I guess we have to allow him a bit of video, since the main focus of his talk is getting around discussing the role of video in the future of the web in terms of user-created content, but also for tele-presence and surveillance. He sees a place for consumer, prosumer and professional video content; given that almost 100 people have viewed the 9-second YouTube video showing my boyfriend making a Riedel wineglass chime by tapping it against his forehead, I truly believe that there’s room for all types of content out there.

Cisco is in the tele-presence business, and De Beer sees tele-presence as a powerful tool for collaboration, especially when it can be embedded in some of the lower-level networking layers for performance and scalability. Now that we’ve all mastered online collaboration in a text-based manner, video is the next step up.

Enterprise 2.0: Ambuj Goyal

Ambuj Goyal of IBM gave the next keynote on the changes that they’re seeing in organizations, and how this is informing their Enterprise 2.0 directions. Like any established software vendor would do, he started his history lesson around 12 years ago, where presumably vendors like IBM actually invented Enterprise 2.0 but just didn’t think to call it that. All kidding aside, Lotus Notes was a groundbreaking collaboration tool in its time — long before IBM bought Lotus — and likely helped to drive the demand for the ability to collaborate.

He looks at how changes in technology (lighter weight infrastructure and simpler programming models), economics (new business designs that address the long tail) and community (capturing the wisdom of the masses) combine to form Web 2.0, then dug into IBM’s Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 product offerings.

  • WebSphere Portal as a mashup platform, with all it’s AJAX-y goodness.
  • WebSphere Commerce,which is an online shopping platform; after several minutes of trying to get a video showing WebSphere Commerce working — what I feel to be the ultimate cop-out in a presentation — one of Goyal’s colleagues hopped up on stage and narrated the now-silent video.
  • Web Interface for Content Management. It’s been a few years since I sat down in front of IBM’s Content Manager’s web interface, and I really hope that it’s improved since then, or they’re really stretching it to even mention Web 2.0 and the old CM web interface in the same breath. What ECM really needs is user-generated tagging, which I don’t think that they’re doing yet. Of course, there’s still the outstanding issue of what they’re doing with the FileNet ECM, which I heard was going to become the standard content platform offered by IBM, and likely would have a completely difference web interface.
  • Info 2.0, which appears to include feed management, tagging and mashups within enterprise-strength security and scalability behind it. This is an early view of products that are coming out later this year, including QEDWiki for creating mashups, which I saw at Mashup Camp last year; unfortunately, we were subjected to another canned video after several technical glitches, but still no audio so we had another live voice-over for the video. Why not just show us a demo? I assume that it may also include some repackaged version of Dogear, their internal enterprise social booking tool; this has been an obvious application for productization, although my suggestion of this to all my IBM friends seemed to fall on deaf ears in the past year.
  • Lotus Connections — is this a reinvented version of Notes? Goyal refers it to a brand-new product, but I’m not sure why it is trying to leverage the not-very-chi-chi Lotus brand. Apparently, it includes blogging, profiles, bookmarks (maybe this is were Dogear will show up) and ad hoc collaboration.

Unfortunately, IBM seems to be doing its usual trick of having several products that sit over the same space (usually to provide legacy support of existing installations) without a good distinction between them. I’d love to see a roadmap of how all this fits together: which products are intended to provide an upgrade path for legacy products, and which are intended for new installations.

I completely understand that vendors are given space on the speaking platform in exchange for buying big booths at the trade show, but I really rely on the vendors to provide something of value rather than just a cataloguing of their own products. They gain so much more by demonstrating a deep understanding of the concepts and a vision of the future.

Enterprise 2.0: Andrew McAfee keynote

The second keynote was by Andrew McAfee, the Harvard professor who originally coined the term “Enterprise 2.0” only a year ago, speaking on the state of that particular meme. He started off discussing awareness of the meme, which has really taken off in the past year. It involves the use of social software within enterprises, network effects that occur when you can gather contributions from anyone in the organization, and freeform authoring.

He touched on how categorization has moved from strict, professionally-created taxonomies to folksonomies, and the benefits that can result; for example, how the wild, wild west of the unorganized internet has become more categorized and structured over the past years, allowing it to be with library-like precision as required.

He touched briefly on the technology behind Enterprise 2.0, but didn’t have any particular insights in that area: enterprise needs, ease of use, yeah yeah.

He moved on to a discussion on communicating the results of Enterprise 2.0; he thinks that we’re doing a pretty mediocre job of this right now, with people tending to fall back on referring to the same Enterprise 2.0 success stories to try and convince executives to put up the cash to bring this into their organization. He claims that there’s not enough case studies or benchmarks, which is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: it’s hard to get people to buy without the case studies, but you’re not going to have any successes to develop into case studies if someone doesn’t just take the leap and get started. This, of course, is not unique to Enterprise 2.0: the same happens with any new technology, particularly disruptive technology like Enterprise 2.0 that might threaten both IT and business executives.

McAfee wants to help create a repository of Enterprise 2.0 successes stories (from which he will undoubtedly write a best-selling book 🙂 ), and challenged some vendors to step up and create some sort of wiki-like environment in order to house this.

He finished up by admitting how his own opinions of the value of social networks and the wisdom of the crowds has changed 180 degrees in the past year, from thinking that people who interact mostly online are a bit pathetic, and that the IQ of a crowd is around that of the dumbest person in it, to believing in the power of online social networking, blogging and the like, and recognizing that the collective wisdom of a crowd can be, with the right technology and environment, greater than that of the smartest person in the group.