Rich Internet Applications

Anything having to do with computers is apt to be wrapped in strange terms and even stranger acronyms. "Rich Internet Applications" and its acronym RIA provide two good examples. What do they mean?

In Web 1.0, what we have been using since day one, a page of information was sent from a server (a computer that manages files rather than computing) to a browser on your PC. Sometimes you entered some information and then your computer sent the page back to the server where it was processed and a third page was sent back to you. Simple and straight forward.

In Web 2.0, and its enterprise application Enterprise 2.0, there are opportunities to request or open an initial page and then just exchange portions of a page or even process information on your browser. Examples: real time updating of sport scores or market prices. For these applications where data changes periodically think of Web 1.0 as a newspaper where you get later data with a later edition and 2.0 as television where the data is always current. Another example is a mortgage calculator where the tool to do the calculations is sent to your computer but your data stays in your computer; it doesn't have to be sent anywhere to be processed. Usually faster, in some cases more secure, but no longer as simple and straight forward.

Better? That depends on what you want to do and what you expect. How often does you Website change? How often does your competitor's Website change? Does a faster rate of change give your customers a real or apparently better or more interesting experience? Some examples of a variety of rich internet applications are here.

IT 2.0

Our focus to date has been on the future of Enterprise 2.0 with regard to four communities: customers, contracts, corporation and HR. There are some trends in information technology (IT) that are enabling what is happening in these four enterprise communities and is in turn being driven by them.

In a March 2000 study by PricewaterhouseCoopers titled Why isn't IT spending creating more value? looks at the value of IT spending from 1973 to 2006. They concluded that, "from 1995 to 2000, information technology played a central role in the productivity of IT-intensive industries [and] that the decline in quality-adjusted prices and the increase in computer processing power contributed 'directly to aggregate, or economy-wide, productivity gains.' ... business communications equipment, hardware, and software began contributing less to rising US productivity after 2000.

"PricewaterhouseCoopers believes that the decline in IT-related productivity over the past few years is attributable partly to an unintended consequence of Moore’s Law. ... As the cost of computer power has continued to fall, it has been easier and easier to fulfill business units’ demands for more features, functions, and applications. The result is greatly increased IT complexity, a phenomenon we refer to as Moore’s Flaw.

"A significant challenge for companies, then, is to manage out unneeded complexity. Once they free up corporate resources by managing out complexity, they’ll be able to redirect these resources to spending on IT innovation.

"IT innovation is the chief casualty of this preoccupation with system maintenance. In 2007, only 13 percent of the average IT budget supported innovation in business processes or products. ... The remaining 87 percent disappeared into the black hole of general maintenance and upkeep, ... The key is that the proportion of IT budgets dedicated to innovation must increase, complexity must be managed out to prevent innovation from drowning in a sea of redundant systems, applications, and hardware.

"A good example of a highly strategic redeployment of resources is ... Hewlett-Packard. ... The company reclaimed IT dollars from the dustbin of system maintenance—resources that could then be targeted to whatever innovations HP’s employees could conjure up.

Before	After
85+ data centers in 29 countries	3 paired centers
3,500 to 5,000+ applications	1,100 applications
21,700+ servers	14,000 servers
762+ data marts	Single view of the enterprise
Excessive power consumption	Power and wattage reduced by 65%"

"... today’s executives need a much better understanding of which IT investments maintain and create competitive distinction, and which can—and should—be cut or managed differently. ... A good place to start is by understanding the potential correlation between IT spending and profitability.

"Over the next five years, enterprise software will continue its evolution to offer a management platform that allows customers to design, deploy, manage, and measure their own unique business processes. This structural transition is fundamentally altering the nature and purpose of enterprise applications and, PricewaterhouseCoopers believes, will be more disruptive than the move to client/server architecture in the 1990s. The core of the next generation of enterprise software is the concept of "loose coupling," or decoupling the business process logic from static source code so that the software can be modified and managed to accommodate changing business requirements."

Enterprise 1.0	Enterprise 2.0	Impact
Process standardization	Process differentiation	Firms will be able to differentiate their business processes, releasing a new wave of innovation.
Systems integration	Process integration	Instead of conforming to the static way that systems function, a business will be able to configure and manage systems to meet changing needs, making the entire organization more agile.
Go-live	Continuous Releasing	Releasing business process logic from static source code means companies will continually manage and improve how systems support the business.
Data capture	Data insight	Companies will move from a focus on data collection to a focus on data analysis that drives competitive insight.

E2W2 comments: The PricewaterhousCoopers' paper is written for C-level officers because of the impact the change in IT will have on the way the enterprise does business. Fortunately, many of the changes that will occur in the business will be enabled and enhanced by these changes in IT. There are problems, of course. Many of the security structures now in place will have to be modified to manage date as it is processed and made available to different users, some of whom may not be authorized to view some of the data. As users gain power in tailoring their systems some of the costs will be moved from IT to the users so trend-line data may be skewed. These are relatively small prices to pay for the benefits. The good news is that IT and the rest of the business will be working more closely together.

You can obtain a copy of the paper Why isn’t IT spending creating more value? from PricewaterhouseCoopers.

HR 2.0

One of the Enterprise 2.0 communities we have identified is HR to include both both recruiting and retention. There are some interesting changes going on within Enterprise 2.0.

Job boards are everywhere and they range from barely useful to worthless. They are more like Friday night singles bars than business tools. Almost all of them are populated by jobs from recruiters who take job seekers' resumes, strip out the identifying information, and pass it on to their client. A resume is a good place to start, but most of us who have been around even a short while have other information posted on Linkedin (recommendations and groups), Facebook (comments and groups), Websites and blogs. A resume is like a quick conversation in a noisy bar, not much on which to base a future relationship.

How can a candidate learn more about a company? A recent example is Glassdoor.com. They invite employees to post sample of salaries and comment on the company as a place to work. Does that provide a "bitching place" for employees? The growing experience with Enterprise 2.0 suggests that there will be some bad apples but a large part of any community will respond responsibly. Cisco has 54 reviews and John T. Chambers, Chairman and CEO gave the site a 95% Approval Rating. Microsoft has 155 ratings, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO gave the site a 65% approval rating. They have ratings from a lot of companies you know including IBM, Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Apple and maybe yours. This type of reporting is part of the transparency of Enterprise 2.0. It will upset the apple cart for those who insist on secrecy for salary ranges and make the marketplace more competitive. The job seekers in the HR community are changing the game.

How can you screen that huge stack of resumes? Talent Spring has created a ranking system using anonymous comparative rankings of resumes. Interesting concept but not well explained on their Web site. Instead go to The Chad.JobCentral.com for two very clear and clever visual presentations: "Employees benefit from Resume Scoring" and "Talent Spring's benefit to Employers." Basically, resume submitters rank others resumes, A is better B, and the best are sent to you for the next steps. Presumably people who submit a resume for a job know something about the job and can evaluate the buzzwords and specifics.

How can a candidate submit more than a resume, avoid buzzword bingo and get matched with the best jobs? Thar is what JobFox offers. An applicant defines their skills and experience by choosing and ranking the best words offered by JobFox to assure common terminology for applicants and employers. They diagram the applicant's work experience and offer a "psychological" test -- take it or choose not to. Specify locations, salary, etc. Add your resume and post the whole package on the JobFox site. Employers go through a similar process in defining the job map from one set of terms and to avoid buzzwords. JobFox immediately matches jobs to resumes on file and provides the employer a ranked list with matches including categories, e.g., salary, education, experience, etc. Applicants are notified that their resume has been considered and shown a comparable category match to the job. No more resumes that go down black holes.

How can a company improve its retention rate and succession planning? There are a lot of elements in this area that a common across multiple employers, there are regulatory requirements that are changing and must be met and there is value in being able to compare some information. A large and growing element of Enterprise 2.0 is SaaS -- Software as a Service. Basically, the computers, data and applications are housed in an off site utility. Cornerstoneondemand.com is an example of such a company. They provide learning (more than 30,000 training titles), performance evaluations, compensation, succession and compliance services online. Much of what they offer is in whole or in part delivered to employees desktops and appears as part of the employer's own Web site.

As we pointed out in an earlier post , this level of change needs to be strategic. You have to start at the shallow end of the pool. Pick a target need and start there.

We do not endorse any of these solutions. We present them just to give you some ideas about how the world of HR is changing in response to Enterprise 2.0. Comments, reactions, other changes we should know about? Please let us know by clicking "Post a Comment" below.

Enterprise 2.0 Strategists

Enterprise 2.0 Strategists are the ambassadors of E2.0. They are the authorized representatives of business executives or information technology. They speak the languages of business and technology and know the cultures of business, technology and Enterprise 2.0.

Business analysts played this role for the development and enhancement of business processes, legacy systems, and Web 1.0. The focus then was on processes, either the systematization of existing processes or the design of new processes to take advantage of changes in technology. The impact of processes and/or technology changes were a factor to be considered as part of the implementation and training plans but did not have a significant impact on design.

Web 2.0 applications may incorporate legacy, Web 1.0 and new technologies. The emphasis is on the technologies with some regard for the changing environment or culture in which a particular set of technologies will be used. It encompasses both enterprise technology and culture plus technologies and cultures found outside of enterprises. Outside examples include personal blogging, social networks and wikis that are not linked to specific enterprises.

Enterprise 2.0 uses the technologies of Web 2.0 but reflects the business requirements and cultural issues of an enterprise. Changes in the business environment or culture are a significant element in the design of strategies for E2. In its most effective form, an E2 strategy changes the culture of the market, business relationships, internal operations, and/or human resources recruiting and retention.

In an earlier post, we talked about four corporate communities to be considered for Enterprise 2.0 strategies: customers-who buys, who influences, competitors, etc., contracts-suppliers, dealers, advertising and PR agencies, law firms, etc., corporate including marketing, finance, production, lines of business, etc., and HR-with particular emphasis on recruiting and retention.

Outside the enterprise, Web 2.0 tends to look at just one or two communities at a time. Within the enterprise, one of these may represent a good place to start but the strategy must expand to encompass all four. We also posed four questions:

What are your:
Communities doing today? - probably more than you expect
What are your tactics for these four communities?
What are your strategies for these four communities?
What are your plans to manage these strategies?

None of these questions are focused on technology although the answers will involve technologies. The tactics and strategies will depend on what you and your competitors are doing and the needs of your enterprise and each of your communities. The tactics and strategies need to be coordinated because these communities overlap to some extend, e.g., how your deal with your customer communities will be known to your recruiting and employee communities.

If you have started, congratulations. Where do you go from here? If you haven't started, where do you start? There is no single answer but experienced business analysts who are familiar with Web 2.0 within and beyond the enterprise are good candidates to start designing processes that will lead to the answers you need for your enterprise.

A three year history of Web 2.0 - Business Week

Sometimes the Internet moves fast and sometimes it flutters and dances more like a butterfly making it almost impossible to figure out where it will go next. The May 22 issue of Business Week cover story is Beyond Blogs. It is a follow-up to a 2005 story, just three years ago. At that time they said: "'Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out,' we warned, adding: 'Catch up...or catch you later.'"

They took their own advice and created Blogspotting.net It is still in use. The current post is about a future BW article asking customers for ideas about what should be covered and asking for input. 0.1: We tell our readers what we think they want to know. 2.0: We work with our readers to assure our content is relevant to their interests.

Three years ago, we wrote a big story—but missed a bigger one. We focused on blogs as a new form of printing press, one that turned Gutenberg's economics on its head, making everyone a potential publisher. ... But blogs, it turns out, are just one of the do-it-yourself tools to emerge on the Internet. Vast social networks such as Facebook and MySpace offer people new ways to meet and exchange information. Sites like Linkedin help millions forge important work relationships and alliances. New applications pop up every week. While only a small slice of the population wants to blog, a far larger swath of humanity is eager to make friends and contacts, to exchange pictures and music, to share activities and ideas.

This can be disturbing for top management, who are losing control, at least in the traditional sense. ... But there's an upside to the loss of control. Ambitious workers use these tools to land new deals and to assemble global teams for collaborative projects. The potential for both better and worse is huge, and it's growing—and since 2005 the technologies involved extend far beyond blogs. So our first fix is to lose "blogs" from our headline. The revised title: "Social Media Will Change Your Business."

We can relate to this. Our focus is Enterprise 2.0 but the interface between what's happening within enterprises and what is happening in the rest of the world is blurring. Executives are publicly blogging, McKinsey & Company is on Facebook and one of America's largest banks is represented on Facebook by a branch in the mid-west, not by headquarters PR. Social media with the emphasis on media rather than technology makes a lot of sense. On the other hand, there are productivity changes, HR changes and contractor interface changes that are as important to the enterprise as the more visible marketplace changes.

Since our story, major investors and corporations have focused on the profit potential of social sites. Like Baron's Twitter crowd writ large, they promise relationships, millions of them. Such media could be worth a fortune. Strike that: They'd better be. Over the past three years, tech and media companies have been opening up their checkbooks for these properties. Google gobbled up YouTube for $1.65 billion; NewsCorp bought MySpace for $588 million; and Microsoft bought a pricey slice of Facebook that put a $15 billion valuation on the company. Venture firms, meanwhile, have been racing to fund scores of social media startups.

Sometimes it is easier to guess where we are going when we have the perspective of history. When a three year period provides that kind of perspective, you know things are happening fast and fluttering in multiple directions. You can read the complete story at:Beyond Blogs

2.0 vs. 1.0 - The Amazing Money Machine

An article in the June 2008 Atlantic Monthly by Joshua Green describes Barack Obama’s Amazing Money Machine. We have selected only the parts that reflect Web and Enterprise 2.0 as contrast to the 1.0 approach of Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

In 2004, Mark Gorenberg, a key player in this story, started applying Silicon Valley’s networking strategies and, “By the end of the 2004 campaign, Gorenberg had surpassed all the old names to become Kerry’s biggest fund-raiser. Gorenberg teamed up with a friend, Nadine North, ... to pursue a new goal in 2006: helping Democrats win back the House of Representatives ... By November, Gorenberg and North were among the top Democratic fund-raisers nationwide.

“Barack Obama was new to most Americans when he entered the presidential race, in February 2007. … What ultimately transformed the presidential race—what swept Obama past his rivals to dizzying new levels of campaign wealth—was not the money that poured in from Silicon Valley but the technology and the ethos. The campaign’s focal point is My.BarackObama.com, which has made better use of technology than its rivals since the beginning.

"When My.BarackObama.com launched, at the start of the campaign, its lineage was clear. The site is a social-networking hub centered on the candidate and designed to give users a practically unlimited array of ways to participate in the campaign. You can register to vote or start your own affinity group, with a listserv for your friends. You can download an Obama news widget to stay current, or another one that scrolls Obama’s biography, with pictures, in an endless loop. You can click a “Make Calls” button, receive a list of phone numbers, and spread the good news to voters across the country, right there in your home. You can get text-message updates on your mobile phone and choose from among 12 Obama-themed ring tones, so that each time Mom calls you will hear Barack Obama cry 'Yes we can!' and be reminded that Mom should register to vote, too.

“'We’ve tried to bring two principles to this campaign,' Rospars told me. 'One is lowering the barriers to entry and making it as easy as possible for folks who come to our Web site. The other is raising the expectation of what it means to be a supporter. It’s not enough to have a bumper sticker. We want you to give five dollars, make some calls, host an event. If you look at the messages we send to people over time, there’s a presumption that they will organize.'

"The true killer app on My.BarackObama.com is the suite of fund-raising tools. You can, of course, click on a button and make a donation, or you can sign up for the subscription model, as thousands already have, and donate a little every month. You can set up your own page, establish your target number, pound your friends into submission with e-mails to pony up, and watch your personal fund-raising 'thermometer' rise. 'The idea,' Rospars says, 'is to give them the tools and have them go out and do all this on their own.' … The Clinton campaign belatedly sought to mimic Obama’s Internet success, and has raised what in any other context would be considered significant money online—but nothing like Obama’s totals, in dollars or donors. John McCain’s online fund-raising has been abysmal.

“ 'What’s amazing,' says Peter Leyden of the New Politics Institute, 'is that Hillary built the best campaign that has ever been done in Democratic politics on the old model—she raised more money than anyone before her, she locked down all the party stalwarts, she assembled an all-star team of consultants, and she really mastered this top-down, command-and-control type of outfit. And yet, she’s getting beaten by this political start-up that is essentially a totally different model of the new politics.

"The alchemy of social networking and the presidential race has given Obama claim to some of the most fabulous numbers in politics: 750,000 active volunteers, 8,000 affinity groups, and 30,000 events. But the most important number, and the clue to how Obama’s machine has transformed the contours of politics, is the number of people who have contributed to his campaign—particularly the flood of small donors. Much of Clinton’s haul, and McCain’s, too, has come from the sort of people accustomed to being wooed in the living room, and Obama initially relied on them, too. But while his rivals continued to depend on big givers, Obama gained more and more small donors, until they finally eclipsed the big ones altogether. In February, the Obama campaign reported that 94 percent of their donations came in increments of $200 or less, versus 26 percent for Clinton and 13 percent for McCain. Obama’s claim of 1,276,000 donors through March is so large that Clinton doesn’t bother to compete; she stopped regularly providing her own number last year.

“'If the typical Gore event was 20 people in a living room writing six-figure checks,' Gorenberg told me, 'and the Kerry event was 2,000 people in a hotel ballroom writing four-figure checks, this year for Obama we have stadium rallies of 20,000 people who pay absolutely nothing, and then go home and contribute a few dollars online.' Obama himself shrewdly capitalizes on both the turnout and the connectivity of his stadium crowds by routinely asking them to hold up their cell phones and punch in a five-digit number to text their contact information to the campaign—to win their commitment right there on the spot.”

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A couple of lessons here:

• The people driving the Web 2.0 approach started early and learned fast. This is their third success and each built on the prior one.
• It is partly the technology but mostly it is a 2.0 relationship -- community, collaboration, conversation -- between the product – political candidate – and the market – voters .

This is not the complete story of the 2008 race to the Whitehouse. Complex undertakings almost never have just one story line. But two dominate players using 0.1 approaches are meeting unpredictable difficulty in dominating a 0.2 player. You cna read the complete article in the June 2008 Atlantic Monthly.

Is there a moral here for your enterprise?

Enterprise 2.0: Presentation

We like a combination of words and pictures so we put together a PowerPoint presentation. Enterprise 2.0 What is it? What's Next? in the sense of what is next for your organization.

| View | Upload your own

It is posted on slideshare.net and you can download the PowerPoint file from About in the right hand column of this post.

In a survey titled:How businesses are using Web 2.0: A McKinsey Global Survey, McKinsey & Company used a similar structure and found that among their respondents: 70% are using Web 2.0 to interface with customers, 51% to interface with suppliers and partners, and 75% to manage collaboration internally.

IBM Social Computing Guidelines

One of the things we observed in our post about Facebook is that members are asked for the name of their employer. The same is true for Linkedin and a many other social networks and some multi-participant blogs. Your employees are representing you whether they intend to or not and whether you want them to or not. IBM addressed this head-on and a set of guidelines were developed and have been updated.

The most interesting aspect of the IBM guidelines is the context in which they were created:

[E]merging online collaboration platforms are fundamentally changing the way IBMers work and engage with each other, clients and partners.

IBM is increasingly exploring how online discourse through social computing can empower IBMers as global professionals, innovators and citizens. These individual interactions represent a new model: not mass communications, but masses of communicators. …

As an innovation-based company, we believe in the importance of open exchange and learning—between IBM and its clients, and among the many constituents of our emerging business and societal ecosystem. The rapidly growing phenomenon of user-generated web content—blogging, social web-applications and networking—are emerging important arenas for that kind of engagement and learning.

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IBM Social Computing Guidelines

Blogs, wikis, social networks, virtual worlds and social media

In the spring of 2005, IBMers used a wiki to create a set of guidelines for all IBMers who wanted to blog. These guidelines aimed to provide helpful, practical advice—and also to protect both IBM bloggers and IBM itself, as the company sought to embrace the blogosphere. Since then, many new forms of social media have emerged. So we turned to IBMers again to re-examine our guidelines and determine what needed to be modified. The effort has broadened the scope of the existing guidelines to include all forms of social computing.

Below are the current and official "IBM Social Computing Guidelines," which continue to evolve as new technologies and social networking tools become available. available here

For the skeptics in our audience, the final admonition is:

Don't forget your day job. You should make sure that your online activities do not interfere with your job or commitments to customers.

1.0 vs 2.0, History, and Security

The impact of Web 2.0

A great deal of what we are calling Web 1.0 will probably be around for a long time. But the current presidential primary campaign is beginning to show us how 1.0 will be impacted by 2.0 in some areas.

Senator Obama is running a 2.0 campaign whereas Senator Clinton is closer to 1.0. For the first quarter of 2008, Obama, “brought in nearly as much as the $26 million raised by Democratic front-runner Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. But his base of 100,000 supporters was double that of Clinton, with a reported 50,000." People who are giving money are part of committed community which means his efforts got as much money and more commitment.

“Leading Silicon Valley insiders noted that Obama raised nearly $7 million on the Internet thanks to an aggressive effort involving bloggers, social networking and other activities that far outpaced the endeavors of other leading Democratic candidates. It includes 4,000 My.BarackObama.com groups, 9,000 Obama bloggers and 50,000 online donors.” SFGate

His Web site is a great example of EW2 with ways to engage the by-standers and the active participants. Lots of news. Want to show your support? You can click and have your own fundraising page on his site:

Your own personal fundraising page will put the financial future of this campaign in your hands. You set your own goal, you do the outreach, and you get the credit for the results. Your personal fundraising page can include your own photo and testimonial, and a thermometer that will show your progress toward your goal in real time.

The site also includes links to 16 Web 2.0 social networking sites including Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Digg and YouTube.

Background

For those of you who are interested in diving deeper into the changes that are occurring, we recommend an article that was written in 2005 – in our real lives that not very long ago but in this one it was just after the dawning: What Is Web 2.0. It was written by Tim O’Reilly who is credited with creating the term “Web 2.0.” A couple of quotes:

If an essential part of Web 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence, turning the web into a kind of global brain, the blogosphere is the equivalent of constant mental chatter in the forebrain, the voice we hear in all of our heads. It may not reflect the deep structure of the brain, which is often unconscious, but is instead the equivalent of conscious thought. And as a reflection of conscious thought and attention, the blogosphere has begun to have a powerful effect.

The world of Web 2.0 is also the world of what Dan Gillmor calls "we, the media," a world in which "the former audience", not a few people in a back room, decides what's important.

Security

In a February 2007 article, titled Most Business Tech Pros Wary About Web 2.0 Tools In Business, Information Week addressed a number of concerns. The concerns security were summed up in one paragraph:

Wells Fargo employees are embracing hundreds of blogs to brainstorm with one another and interact with customers. Yet on another Enterprise 2.0 front, integrated search, the company has limited employees' ability to search across data repositories because of the complex authorization schemes needed to keep people from accessing information they shouldn't. About 80% of development and deployment time for customer-facing and internal tools is spent on security measures such as authentication and authorization, says Steve Ellis, executive VP of Wells Fargo's wholesale solutions group.

What’s in Your [Corporate] Facebook?

A couple of weeks ago we got a message from Mckinsey & Company regarding our online subscription to The McKinsey Quarterly that also mentioned that the company now has a page on Facebook. If Facebook has come of age for a prestigious company like McKinsey, we needed to check it out.

Facebook is an example of a Web 2.0 application that is being embraced by enterprises which makes it part of EW2. McKinsey is an outstanding example of this adoption.

One thing led to another and we did some research. We began with a list of the Fortune 1000 companies by industry plus lists of accounting, management consulting, and law firms. We looked at about 75 Facebook pages; just the largest firms in their respective industries.

Facebook started on college campuses which are communities of your future employees. Many former members of those communities are now in your company. When they registered for Facebook they were asked to list where they work. We only looked at large companies, but we didn’t find a single site where a company had fewer than 100 employees on Facebook.

Several companies had excellent examples of conversations for future employment, but we were surprised by how few. All of your employees on Facebook are communicators and probably proud to be affiliated with your company; the kind of employees you would like to keep. They’re one of your internal communities.

One major accounting firm only has a careers page but it includes information about and links to their corporate responsibility activities, inclusion programs, key questions applicants want answered, and a discussion board about working at the firm that has 132 topics. They have 14,099 fans; that is a large community by any measure.

We found several page sponsored by a subsidiary. Two were from South Africa and one from Hong Kong – these were all American based companies. In none of these cases did the US company have a page. For one of the largest banks, the closest thing they had to a corporate page was one sponsored by a branch in the mid-west.

A common application (provide by Facebook) is a place to list corporate events like trade shows where friends and fans can meet you and get more information. A couple of these offered opportunities to raise questions the company would like to have addressed at presentations and one even had a discussion area to collect opinions and help address some anticipated questions.

Enterprise 2.0, particularly relates to public communities. It looks like it would be a natural for public relations firms to be participating. We did not find a single large firm with a Facebook page other than the one from a Hong Kong office.

A games manufacturer has a list of release dates for new and updated games beyond the end of 2008 and provides downloads of some of the art work. In an earlier assignment we helped a credit card company deal with providing art work for their retailers’ Web sites to protect the card company’s image because Web site developers were borrowing artwork wherever they could find it and the quality was often unacceptable. The games company has a solution.

There was one linked page that is part of a worldwide communication strategy for the company’s 5,000 dealers around the world. The site appears to have been developed by the dealers, not the company.

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One thing we have learned very fast is you cannot get up to speed in EW2 quickly. It is simply too different, too varied, and too extensively to understand and apply quickly. The companies that are in the shallow end of the pool today are learning and some of them are applying what they are learning very well. Perhaps the two best examples we found were Symantec and Ernst & Young Careers.

There are communities out there that are using your name. Most of them to your advantage, but none as well as they could. What’s in your [Corporate] Facebook pages?

Where do you start?

First, Link to Facebook at http://facebook.com and then put your company’s name in the search box and see what you find. Second, get a list of your competitors and collaborators in terms of your public markets and your contract relationships (dealers, suppliers, etc.) Find out what they are doing on Facebook and see what you can learn. Third, pick your targets. This should involve collaboration between marketing, public relations, HR, and IT with a bit of legal and strategic planning thrown in. Fourth, establish a presence on Facebook; this is not high tech. Let your employees know what you are planning and seek their collaboration. Fifth develop a strategy for each area and begin to execute it.

Facebook is a process, not an event. If you are not willing to stay with it, don’t start. Stale pages say “We don’t care about you any more.”

Enterprise 2.0 is 20% technology and 80% culture. You cannot put old wine in new bottles and succeed. You need to focus on communities, participate in conversations and collaborate with your communities to produce results that work for them and you. Facebook is one of the places you can begin to do this.

Change enablers, not drivers

We did some market research using Linkedin. The question: Most of what is described as Web 2.0 is happening in the public part of the Internet, e.g., FaceBook, MySpace, blogs and wikis. The capabilities are visible on the horizon and starting to move into the enterprise and then to expand to the extended enterprise. Is the culture ready to embrace wider collaboration?

We got a lot of good answers but two deserve wider distribution [Our notes in brackets]:

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… As an auditor, I like the natural documentation that occurs within these systems. But I can see where legal would struggle with them. In either case, I'd always opt to house them internally so controls can be implemented and personal privacy can be maintained. [That would probably work for material the auditors are interested in.] Allan

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My experience with "external" groupware solutions is somewhat mixed. Since most of my management has been of technical staff, bear in mind that my viewpoints are based upon this. To start answering your question, I believe it's important to subdivide "The Culture" into two groups: The Proletariat Culture and The Management Culture.

The Proletariat

At times, it seems that any time an organization imposes a collaborative tool upon the proletariat, the aforementioned tool is judged harshly by the proletariat and untrusted. Perhaps the feeling that big brother is watching them and recording their every interaction makes people less likely to engage in some of the witty banter which makes the social aspects of group activities more appealing. I doubt every meeting ever held has been 100% work-related. I can certainly recall a few from my distant past which were quite productive, but not entirely focused on work topics. These stress releases are an important part of the bonding experience that makes groupware the synergistic tool that it is.

Perhaps the feeling that the decision for the groupware tool was based upon pricing, invasiveness, politics, executive boondoggles, or "some new management fad" keeps the people from truly embracing it. Or, more insidiously, perhaps those people who intentionally hide their knowledge or actions, want to keep their knowledge or actions "off the record".

If your workforce is likely to experience any of these reactions to the selection of a collaborative tool, you absolutely need to address those issues before you could bother considering such an approach to improve collaboration. Software only automates what you already have and makes it happen faster. If your organization's social networks are diseased, social software will expedite its demise.

Management

If your goal is simply to give people a tool in which they could collaborate, have them just start considering, themselves, what they should use. This will most certainly foster its rapid adoption and widespread use. If remote, time-displaced, or part-time workers can get up to speed on current topics and offer their participation where they otherwise might not, it may catch on.

However, if management's goal is a universal "fix" for poor collaboration, to impose collaboration where there is none already, or to impose a given communication tool as THE tool for Knowledge Management (KM) knowledge bases and subsequent data mining, they are setting themselves up for a rude awakening.

Processes only work with the compliance of the people. And people MAY not feel that working in a collaborative tool is the best way for them to collaborate. Some may prefer the immediate, yet remote, interactions of Instant Messaging. Others, with the luxury of physical proximity to one another, may get up from their e-mails or IM window and actually go to someone's space and speak with them, at length, about the topic at hand. Still others will need to see things physically, and want to whiteboard their thoughts and ideas while they're still forming -- without the fear that their incomplete and perhaps partially flawed ideas will be committed, for all eternity, to an electronic storage facility.

So, the difficulty is most certainly NOT in the implementation of the technology -- that's simple. The difficulty is in getting what you want out of it. If you want very little out of it, why even bother? If you want a lot out of it, then it's worth it to spend some time understanding what the target is, before using a piece of software to accomplish it. Perhaps the answer is already in place, waiting to be used/hired/fired/promoted. David

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We agree with David that Enterprise 2.0 is an enabler, it will allow and encourage people to collaborate and communicate, it will not drive them to it.

It's about time

In an article in Forbes, George Gilder said: “In an age of affluence, life spans become the residual scarcity against which the values of policies, companies, and commodities are measured. The question becomes, Are you a life-span extender or a life-spam vendor? ... the Internet now casts a shadow over the entire established information economy. Just as the lightspeed limit opens large opportunities for companies supplying new network computers and topologies, so the life-span limit opens large opportunities for companies that focus on saving the customer's time.”

We like the acronym: ROTI – Return On Time Invested – to describe this.

The people you want to connect with have plenty to do. They are not looking for something to do in addition to what they are doing. They are looking for an alternative to what they are doing that will make them more effective, informed, entertained, connected, etc. One measure of the value of what you provide is how well you do that quicker.

Enterprise 2.0 provides opportunities to reduce the time it takes customers and employees to find what they want, do what they need to, and move to the next item on their to-do list. We now rely on our email system to sort our mail, toss out the junk, and help us deal with what we have time for now. But the first time you do this you have to learn how to set up the filters and then you have to keep them current. That takes time. If you get a lot of mail, that’s time well spent. If not, the ROTI is too high.

In building this blog we have been eating from the EW2 candy bowl and the learning curve is making us a bit woozy. Each new tool takes some linear time to learn and tailor. The time to learn and tailor limits the pace of adoption, but those who invest their time wisely are empowered to do more. Life is full of trade-offs.

EW2 sites and other tools that are well built in terms of ease of use and value delivered will optimize ROTI and justify the time it takes the user to use it. Anything less will be resisted by employees or cast aside by customers.

Where do you start?

Don’t eat all the candy at once; you'll get sick.

Enterprise 2.0 (EW2) offers a large number of ways to collaborate and/or carry on a conversation. The technology is relatively simple. The culture that defines when and how to use the technology is evolving. Fortunately you can use the Internet to discover what works in the blogsphere and then select what will work for you and your specific communities of customers, team members, projects, etc.

Start at the shallow end

Like learning to swim, start at the shallow end, learn the basics, test the water. This blog is designed to help you learn something about swimming so at this point we are at the shallow end.

In our post about Definitions we drew distinctions between three types of EW2 applications: Internet or customer conversations, extranet or systems for collaboration with vendors, suppliers, business customers, etc. using secure connections, and intranet or internal systems for knowledge sharing and collaboration. Each has a different starting point.

You could start all three tomorrow but there is enough overlap that a wiser course is to start them sequentially. Your corporation’s circumstances will dictate what to do first and how fast you should proceed. When you took swimming lessons you probably didn’t try to swim from the shallow end to the deep end in your first lesson.

Internet

What’s happening in your market place? What are your direct competitors and others who may be competing for your customers’ dollars doing? You don’t have to be first but you do not want to be a follower who has to struggle to differentiate yourself from a pack.

Put together a team including IT, advertising, public relations, legal and any customer contact organizations like call centers or help desks. Find what they know about EW2, your competitors and customers. Have them look at Web 2.0 systems outside the corporate world and particularly at the ways corporations are using them, e.g., Facebook and MySpace. What are the opportunities to get useful feedback from our customers? Should we add simple feed back options to our Web site as a way to start exploring this. Task IT to explore the software systems you can acquire when you know what you want to do.

Extranet

What’s happening in your supply chain? Depending on which industry you are in it will range from not much to some rapidly developing solutions for orders, catalogs, payments, shipping, shipment management, returns, etc.

Have a meeting with IT, your buyers, your business-to-business sales people, your industrial advertising and PR group. Find out what is happening and their thoughts about what your corporation is doing and or should do. There may be things in place you don’t know about.

Look for ways to share knowledge between the Internet and the extranet group, particularly at the level of the technology and its care and feeding.

Intranet

What’s happening in your corporation? How could you do a better job of collecting knowledge that your people have about markets, systems, competitors, etc.?

Talk with your CIO. Ask her/him what is already in place? Of course you want to hear about the formal projects but it is a pretty good bet that there are informal and pilot applications already in place. The corporation already has the technology to support pilot level applications of EW2. Your employees can download the software and get set up I a matter of hours and some of them probably have. There is anecdotal evidence of this type of activity showing up in the blogsphere.

You may already have some demonstration projects you can use to help you understand the benefits. If you do, exploit them. If not, have your CIO or another C-level executive that is responsible for big projects identify a project team that has expressed interest. If they have identified the software they want, and there is no good reason not to, get that. If they do not, get the CIO to work with them to make a selection. Do two or three. They are cheap and this is the best way to learn what will work in your corporation. But NOT what is shown in the cartoon.

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Learn fast, learn cheap, stay in the shallow end of the pool until you know the conversations and/or collaborations you want to start and the actions you want them to produce.

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+ Short YouTube videos that explain [topic minutes:seconds]: RSS 3:43 Social Networking 1:47 Wikis 3:52 and Social Bookmarking 3:25 in plain English.

+ For more Web 2.0 cartoons go to Geek & Poke

How big is it?

How big is Enterprise 2.0? Unfortunately you can’t measure what you can’t define and we don’t have a set of agreed definitions yet. Perhaps this lack of definition is best illustrated in a finding from a recent survey:

This study of 441 end users (performed in January 2008) found that a majority of organizations recognize Enterprise 2.0 as critical to the success of their business goals and objectives, but that most do not have a clear understanding of what Enterprise 2.0 is.

In our post of Definitions we noted a number of ways to define EW2 and one way was by the technology that is used. Technorati is currently tracking 112.8 million blogs. The vast majority of those are personal. (You can get the tools to create your own and operate it free at, among other places, Google. Great place to learn but not corporate strength.) Many of your employees are already familiar with the technology.

The CEOBlogsList counted 277 senior executive public blogs as of February. Fifty nine (11.8%) of the Fortune 500 corporations are blogging as of as of this April. (All 500 have Web sites. List)

As an example of the extent of use by leading companies, Motorola is one of the biggest adopters of Web collaboration tools, with 4,400 blogs, 4,200 wiki pages, and 2,600 people actively doing content tagging and social bookmarking.

The Cathedral & Bazaar

In the 1990’s Eric Raymond used the term The Cathedral and the Bazaar as a metaphor for two ways of developing computer software. The cathedral is carefully planned and built by master craftsmen to last forever, or at least a very long time. A bazaar requires some planning but it changes in response to changing demands by vendors and their customers. Almost all corporate systems are much more like cathedrals than bazaars.

Web 1.0 evolved from cathedral systems and was designed to meet the needs of the owners: We want to communicate to you. Customer facing or Internet Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 (EW2) systems need to be more like bazaars in that they will change to meet unknown future needs and must serve both the owners and the users: We want to have a conversation with you.

The thought processes that lead to success are different. Cathedral like systems replace or extend something existing and can be defined, e.g., business processes. IT has spent years training line managers in the terms and steps of developing cathedral like systems: statement of work, requirements analysis, design, development, testing, training and implementation. Line managers tell business analysts what they want and then participated in testing to be sure they get it. Bazaars like systems, i.e., Enterprise 2.0, replace or extend the corporation’s communication with its customers. Communication exists today but is often difficult to define with any precision: a different set of players, a broader set of interests, sharing and collaboration, and at this point not well understood.

Cathedral systems replace or extend business processes. Understand the process and you know what the system must do. Relatively simple and you can learn from prior experience with similar systems. Enterprise 2.0 systems create a new, two-way communication medium. Understand the corporation’s present communication media including advertising, public relations, customer service, call centers, help desks, etc. and you can learn something about how the corporation views its relationship with its customers. But, it won’t tell you much about how customers view their relationships with the corporation or what they want and expect. And, there is no directly comparable experience you can draw on.

In his writing about The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond developed 19 lessons based on his personal experience and observations about open source system development – the bazaar. Five of them are directly applicable to Enterprise 2.0:

• The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
• Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
• Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.
• Provided the development coordinator has a medium at least as good as the Internet [intranet EW2] and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.
• Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.

Definitions: Enterprise 2.0

Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 (EW2) is evolving and its meaning changes depending on who you talk with and when. A number of the early definers are now publishing 2.0 definitions and I reserve the right to do the same.

Systems Technology
One way to define EW2 is the technology used. There are computer and networking systems and applications in the background. I have built a set of systems and technology based definitions, e.g., blog, mash-up and wiki. I will be adding to and modifying them as we move along this linear exploration. Changes will be noted in the next post whenever they occur.

Participants and Relationships
Another way to define Enterprise 2.0 is in terms of the participants and their relationships. There are at least three different sets of participants, those on the public Internet and those on the organization’s intranet and those on the organizations extranet.

EW2 on the Internet reaches out to engage audiences whose relationships with the organization are primarily its products, services and “image.” It is about getting to know you so we can serve you better, and giving you a change to get to know us as something more than products, services and financial statements. The conversations are largely public although some sites may require registration or invitation, postings are monitored for relevance and appropriateness, and results may be proprietary.

EW2 on the intranet serves employees and contractors who may be working on-site or telecommuting. The primary values to the organization are improved knowledge sharing and collaboration. There are a number of other benefits related to being part of the organization. The conversations are internal.

EW2 on the extranet (via secure Internet connections) reaches business customers, vendors, suppliers, contractors and others who typically have some form of contractual relationship with the organization. The sharing of knowledge and collaboration are more focused. The conversations are proprietary.

Core Patterns
For want of a better definition, EW2 is being described in terms of it’s core patterns by Dion Hinchcliffe on ZDnet and others. The headings are his as are the comments in quotes; I have abbreviated some of the comments and added my thoughts.

• Harnessing Collective Intelligence: The value is the exchange and collection of information.
• Data is the Next "Intel Inside": “A phrase that captures the fact that information has become as important … as software.”
• Innovation in Assembly: “The Web has become a massive source of small pieces of data and services, loosely joined …”
• Rich User Experiences: … “full software experiences that enable interaction and immersion in innovative new ways.”
• Software Above the Level of a Single Device: both horizontal and vertical linkage for scalability
• Perpetual Beta: “Software releases are disappearing and continuous change is becoming the norm.” But the first release needs to make a good impression.
• Leveraging the Long Tail: “The mass servicing of micromarkets cost effectively via the Web is one of the primary "killer business models …"
• Lightweight Software/Business Models and Cost Effective Scalability: … “…changing the economics of online software development fundamentally, providing new players powerful new weapons against established players and even entire industries.”

The most significant distinction between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 is:

Web 1.0 makes information available. Web 2.0 enables and invites two way conversations and collaboration. Enterprise 2.0 applies that to the extended enterprise, i.e., Internet, extranet, and intranet.

Enterprise 2.0 is different and it is evolving. For now the
best definition I have found is:

Enterprise 2.0. is a new architecture defined by easier, faster, and contextual organization of and access to information, expertise, and business contacts--whether co-workers, partners, or customers. And all with a degree of personalization sprinkled in.

Cluetrain Manifesto - the beginnng

In 1999 the Internet was moving from the research labs to the marketplace. Some of the thought leaders of the time published the Cluetrain Manifesto. Their opening challenge began:

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A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies. ... These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked.

Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do. ... employees are getting hyperlinked even as markets are. Companies need to listen carefully to both. Mostly, they need to get out of the way so intranetworked employees can converse directly with internetworked markets.

Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It's going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in.

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The tone has changed and almost all major companies now have a presence on the Internet, but that presence often reflects the pre-Internet culture that the authors complained about. Some companies are now clearly moving in the direction of "employees are getting hyperlinked" and those employees are getting linked to each other behind the firewall and to the markets beyond. Enterprise 2.0 is a natural step in the evolution of the Internet, a step that was recognized even before the required technology was available.

You can learn more about the Cluetrain Manifesto at http://www.cluetrain.com/ including a link to the book.

The 1st Day of the Rest of This Blog

I think one of the biggest changes that will impact business enterprises in the next few years will be the further empowering of individuals and work teams by the Internet. Not by what is now commonly called Web 1.0, but by the Enterprise version of Web 2.0.

I have had my own Web site since 1995, lpf.com. I have managed communication for several large project using Web 1.0 technology including intranet, email, conference calls and more. I am hereby stepping into Web 2.0 to gain the hands on experience to assist companies deal with Enterprise 2.0.

Welcome!