February 22, 2008
What's Most Important for Success with Enterprise 2.0?
I spoke earlier this week at the FASTForward conference in Orlando, and used the opportunity to toss out some conjectures about the factors that differentiate successful Enterprise 2.0 deployments from unsuccessful ones. These conjectures were not developed from any rigorous or comprehensive research, but instead are the inductive result of my work over the past two years to understand the use of emergent social software platforms in pursuit of business goals. I can’t claim that they’re complete, 100% correct, or ‘better’ than anyone else’s hypotheses. I present them at this point primarily to get the ideas out there, to stimulate discussion, and perhaps to provide some guidance.
I divide these conjectures into three areas: aspects of the technologies deployed, support for the deployment initiative itself, and the culture of the deploying company. I’ll expand on each of these areas and the individual conjectures in later posts. For now I just wanted to list them so that people can react.
In the lists below bold type denotes importance — things that are especially important to get right in order to succeed with E2.0. Italics denote difficulty— aspects of technology, initiatives, and culture that seem to be particularly hard to get right.
More on all of this will come later. For now, take a look and let us know what you think. Are any of these just plain wrong, or badly off base? Are the lists missing anything critical? Do you agree with the assessments of difficulty and importance, or do you have very different views? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.
Enterprise 2.0 is more likely if...
Technologies
- Tools are intuitive and easy to use
- Tools are egalitarian and freeform
- Borders seem appropriate to users
- At least some of the tools are explicitly social
- The toolset is quickly standardized
Support for the Initiative
- Incentives exist, and are soft
- Excellent gardeners exist
- Patient and dedicated evangelists exist
- Energy and activity are primarily bottom-up
- Effort has official and unofficial support from the top
- Goals are clear and well-explained
Culture
- People are trusted
- Slack exists in the workweek
- Helpfulness has been the norm
- Top management supports lateralization
- There are lots of young people
- There is pent-up demand for better information sharing
February 11, 2008
Here Comes the Neighborhood
I wrote a while back about why corporate managers might have a hard time getting comfortable with Enterprise 2.0 tools and approaches:
"We need to keep in mind that most E2.0 tools are new, and that their acceptance depends on shifts in perspective on the part of business leaders and decision makers, shifts for which the word ‘seismic’ might not be an overstatement. Enterprise 2.0 tools have no inherent respect for organizational boundaries, hierarchies, or job titles..."
I met a little while back with the leaders of a startup E2.0 company who showed me that those words were a little hasty and naive, and that vendors are coming up with tools that have some respect for existing organization structures, yet still foster freeform and emergent collaboration.
Awareness Networks builds, hosts, and deploys integrated E2.0 suites for an impressive roster of customers (I have no financial interest in Awareness, and have received no compensation from the company). These suites include a variety of tools for both user-generated content and social networking, and are hosted by Awareness and integrated into a customer’s existing infrastructure for security and permissions.
As CEO John Bruce, CTO and co-founder David Carter, and VP of Marketing Eric Schurr walked me through their company and its offerings I found myself nodding along and saying to myself "Yep. Yep. Good idea. Good idea..." When they described how neighborhoods work within Awareness, I think I said "Great idea!" out loud.
Each Awareness installation is called a ‘community,’ and each community can contain multiple neighborhoods. Neighborhoods are simply ways to categorize the content that gets contributed over time, and are defined in advance by the people who commissioned the site. Since these people are usually the bosses of the company (or are at least acting on their behalf) neighborhoods tend to reflect the formal organizational structure or goals of the company, or some combination of the two.
For example, a purely internal community (one that doesn’t include customers or suppliers) might have neighborhoods devoted to Sales, Marketing, R&D, ‘Suggestions,’ and ‘Our Values.’ An internal + external community might include neighborhoods like ‘Next Generation Products’ and ‘User Conference 2008.’ Bosses can control who has the ability to view, comment, edit, post, and vote by neighborhood. People can blog, contribute to wikis, participate in polls, votes, and discussions, upload photos and videos, etc. within any of these neighborhoods. Search, tagging, and linking work across all the content that a user can access, regardless of neighborhood.
An Awareness community therefore has both imposed and emergent structure, in what feels to me like the right proportions. Neighborhoods are tools for bosses to impose, up front, how they want content to be categorized. Users, however, probably don’t feel like this is too much of an imposition. They can still author, edit, link, and tag to their heart’s content; they’re just doing so underneath headings that have been specified in advance. So for example the VP of Marketing will probably blog within her neighborhood, but in a well-designed community anyone can find it, read it, link to it, or add a comment.
By categorizing content, neighborhoods make communities easier to navigate and digest, and so make them appear friendlier to their users. I think the bigger benefit, though, might well be that neighborhoods make Enterprise 2.0 environments appear friendlier to bosses. Neighborhoods let bosses impose a bit of structure on what can otherwise seem like a formless and lawless environment, the online equivalent of an untamed frontier. Neighborhoods provide bosses with assurance that things will be orderly rather than chaotic.
It seems like this would be a good thing. What do you think? Leave a comment and tell us what you think of the concept of neighborhoods - would it help to spur E2.0 adoption within your company?
February 05, 2008
What I Learned About Fidelity
A little while back I spoke at a conference sponsored by Fidelity Equity Partners, a private equity firm that’s part of Fidelity. FEP has an interesting investment strategy: they "focus on investing in established high-growth midsized companies that have gained meaningful competitive advantage through the innovative use of information and systems."
This is music to my ears, of course, and I was excited to be part of the event. It gave me an opportunity to present the work my colleagues and I have been conducting on IT’s competitive impact (discussed here, here, and here ), and also to learn about the types of companies FEP is interested in. Five companies presented at the event: AllConnect, Bazaarvoice, HighRoads, iSqFt, and TopCoder (the companies’ descriptions of themselves are included at the end of this post).
The presenting companies were in dissimilar industries and had wildly different business models. What struck me, though, were their similarities, which went beyond an affinity for or reliance on information technology.
As I listened to their presentations, two themes emerged:
The power of novel IT-embedded business processes. The entrepreneurial insight behind each of these firms, I found, could be (very) loosely summarized as "Wait a minute -- here’s a process that isn’t working very well. It takes too long, costs too much, and/or delivers unsatisfactory results. We can make it work a LOT better by applying some technology to it." The processes ranged from getting utilities purchased and turned on after a move (AllConnect) to obtaining construction drawings and bidding on a job (iSqFt) to managing a large corporation’s HR programs and suppliers (HighRoads).
One of the things I find fascinating about process innovations like these is that they’re often only obvious in retrospect. This is also the case with many product innovations. Most of us didn’t realize that our gear for listening to music was sorely lacking until the iPod showed up, and I once heard the history of the pharmaceutical industry summarized as "giving us drugs for medical conditions we didn’t know we had." The compaines presenting at the FEP conference highlighted for me that the same is probably true for many, or even most, of our current processes. How many of them have been looked at with a fresh, critical eye, a holistic perspective, and a technology-friendly mind? Relatively few, I’d guess, which explains why I’m optimistic that the IT-fueled productivity boost has not yet run its course.
These companies and many other examples have also showed me the difference between simply re-engineering a business process on a whiteboard and embedding the new way of working with IT. A process embedded in technology is more standardized, repeatable, and amenable to monitoring than one that’s deployed only with memos, manuals, and training and enforced via audits and checkups. Technology can improve many things. Of these, one of the most important yet least appreciated might be the the ability of process innovators to deploy their new designs, and to have great confidence that they’ll be executed as designed.
An addiction to data. Standardized, IT-enabled business processes throw off a lot of data, and all five companies talked about how powerful these data were, and how many ways there were to make use of them. BazaarVoice could measure how much the addition of user reviews improved conversion rates and order sizes on eCommerce sites, and TopCoder seemed to quantify every aspect of software development, going so far as to give each contributor a numeric rating that was taken quite seriously by all involved. The presentations at the FEP conference reinforced Lord Kelvin‘s belief that "when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of Science, whatever the matter may be."
I walked away from the event thinking that FEP’s investment hypothesis is a sound one, but then again I walked into the event thinking that. I also came away more convinced than ever that that IT-based process redesign is nowhere near complete, and that huge entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial opportunities remain. Most of these opportunities depend not on novel technologies, but instead on novel perspectives on how work should get done.
Company descriptions (provided by the companies themselves)
ALLCONNECT (Atlanta, GA): Allconnect (http://www.allconnect.com) is the leading provider of essential home services and connections during residential relocations. Founded in 1998 to help people during their move, the company establishes a number of residential services for consumers including power, telephone, sewer, cable television, Internet, newspaper, and lawn care all at no cost to consumers. The company partners with more than 30 power companies and hundreds of service providers across the U.S. and employs more than 500 associates.
BAZAARVOICE (Austin, TX): Bazaarvoice (http://www.bazaarvoice.com) offers outsourced technology, services, analytics, and expertise to help companies enhance the online shopping experience with social commerce applications that drive sales. Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews™ and Ask & Answer™ deliver immediate success by minimizing implementation risk and maximizing the strategic impact of user-generated review content through complete customization, deep integration, community management, advanced analytics, search engine optimization, and syndication across the Web and to offline channels.
HIGHROADS (Woburn, MA): HighRoads, Inc. (http://www.highroads.com), the new way of managing HR programs and suppliers, improves the employee experience while dramatically reducing costs for large, complex organizations. HighRoads has automated HR processes for more than 100 Fortune 500 employers along with 700 of their suppliers, consultants and outsourced administrators.
ISqFt (Cincinnati, OH): iSqFt (http://www.isqft.com) provides online bid solicitation and preconstruction management services to the construction industry in the United States. The company’s products include The Private Construction Office, which gives general contractors the ability to distribute project plans, specs, addenda, and other documents to subcontractors and suppliers; and The Internet Plan Room, which provides subcontractors, suppliers, and professional estimators with access to project information, plans, specs, and addenda for publicly bidding construction projects. It serves general contractors, subcontractors, building material suppliers, and manufacturers.
TOPCODER (Glastonbury, CT): TopCoder (http://www.topcoder.com) is a marketplace of freelance software developers. The company uses its own platform for documentation, process, ranking, review, and submission of outsourced development projects as well as sponsored coder competitions. Sponsors use the competitions to recruit and rank developers from around the globe. The TopCoder ranking scores are recognized within the development/hacking community and by the IT hiring community as the best way to quantify the capabilities of a developer. Pulling from competition winners and a component library of winning projects the company provides outsourced development services at a higher quality, lower price, and faster than other major outsourcers.
