When I spoke at KMWorld07 in Silicon Valley last month, I sat in on the presentation made by Charles Armstrong of Trampoline Systems. One of the interesting points he made is that Web 2.0 is the first set of technologies that have been developed in the consumer space before being taken into enterprise use. All other major information technologies have first been developed and used in large organizations before being adapted for consumer use, not least by becoming accessible on price.
I’ve often observed that Enterprise 2.0 initiatives largely stem from executives seeing their children using sites like Facebook, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Digg, YouTube or Remember the Milk, and thinking, “Hmm, I can see that kind of tool being useful inside my organization.”
It is very useful to think of it specifically as that issue: adapting consumer tools and software to be useful inside organizations.
One obvious issue is that of scale. As I point out in my Web 2.0 Framework, one of the key aspects of Web 2.0 is that it “collectively transforms mass participation into valuable outcomes.” In the case of the open consumer web, that mass participation can amount to literally hundreds of millions of people. Organizations at the most have hundreds of thousands, and often far fewer people. This means there are a range of issues in effectively scaling Web 2.0 applications to be valuable inside organizations. However the other side of that is that far more detailed information is available on workers inside companies, including their current projects, training background, work objectives and more, all of which means that aggregating information can be far more usefully applied than in the open web.
Building on the theme of adapting Web 2.0 technologies to be valuable inside organizations, Network Computing has recently published a very good piece titled Can Web 2.0 evolve into an Enterprise Technology? It’s well worth a read. Some of the points it raises:
* Since Web 2.0 gives power to users, it can reduce IT staffing levels. Nutritional products firm Shaklee has reduced IT staff by 20%. It is a significant change issue to have IT staff support these shifts.
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IBM is Platinum Sponsor of Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum! … and launches organizational network analysis tools
By Ross DawsonWe’re very pleased to announce that IBM is Platinum Sponsor of the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum. Given the breadth and maturity of IBM’s Web 2.0 offerings for large organizations, as well as its own experiences in using these tools internally, this makes a lot of sense and will bring a lot of value to the event.
I’ve written extensively about IBM’s initiatives in the space. In January IBM launched Lotus Connections, a suite of collaboration software which today brings much of IBM’s Web 2.0-style offerings, establishing a solid, coherent, credible offering to corporations. Just over two years ago now I blogged about how Lotus was embedding blogs and wikis into IBM’s platforms, in line with their vision that social networking tools were the future of collaboration. Over five years ago, in my book Living Networks, I wrote about how IBM’s alphaWorks provided a platform for user innovation and product development, while earlier this year I pointed to one of alphaWorks’ fantastic initiatives, ManyEyes, which is a participative site for people to upload and mash-up data sets and visualization techniques.
Just today the Lotus Connections suite has expanded further, with the launch of IBM Atlas, a set of social networking visualization and analysis tools. It has four components:
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What most people don’t understand about the long tail
By Ross DawsonThe “long tail” is the buzz-phrase par excellence of the new media revolution. No presentation about how media is changing is complete without it. An image of the long tail, taken from our Future of Media Report 2007, illustrating the scaling of business models along the long tail, is below.
From a media industry perspective, the most important aspect of the long tail is that it illustrates an effective doubling of the size of the media market. The tail is as large as the head, allowing both production and consumption of media from small producers.
However, arguably the most fundamental aspect of the long tail is poorly understood by most people who use the term.
The long tail curve describes an intrinsically network phenomenon – it shows the distribution of the number of connections of each node in the network, from the nodes with the most connections to those with the fewest connections.
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Web 2.0 creating value in organizations: Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum – Sydney, Australia
By Ross DawsonThe first hard-copy flyer for our Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum has just been mailed out. Click here or on the image below to download the flyer as pdf.
Below is the text for the cover letter which went out with the flyer. More detailed updates on the event coming soon.
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ERP: automating processes | Enterprise 2.0: enabling knowledge work
By Ross DawsonThere has been some very interesting discussion over the last week about enterprise software, which began with the question of whether it is sexy or not. It has since covered a wide range of related topics, including the usability of enterprise software, industry structure, how it is bought, its role in attracting talented staff, and whether it can get people laid. (Selected references at the bottom of the post.)
In all of this, there was a gem that I think is well worth exploring. In the context of market opportunities for the biggest enterprise software firm of them all, SAP, Sigurd Rinde wrote (in part):
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Adapting consumer Web 2.0 for use in the enterprise
By Ross DawsonWhen I spoke at KMWorld07 in Silicon Valley last month, I sat in on the presentation made by Charles Armstrong of Trampoline Systems. One of the interesting points he made is that Web 2.0 is the first set of technologies that have been developed in the consumer space before being taken into enterprise use. All other major information technologies have first been developed and used in large organizations before being adapted for consumer use, not least by becoming accessible on price.
I’ve often observed that Enterprise 2.0 initiatives largely stem from executives seeing their children using sites like Facebook, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Digg, YouTube or Remember the Milk, and thinking, “Hmm, I can see that kind of tool being useful inside my organization.”
It is very useful to think of it specifically as that issue: adapting consumer tools and software to be useful inside organizations.
One obvious issue is that of scale. As I point out in my Web 2.0 Framework, one of the key aspects of Web 2.0 is that it “collectively transforms mass participation into valuable outcomes.” In the case of the open consumer web, that mass participation can amount to literally hundreds of millions of people. Organizations at the most have hundreds of thousands, and often far fewer people. This means there are a range of issues in effectively scaling Web 2.0 applications to be valuable inside organizations. However the other side of that is that far more detailed information is available on workers inside companies, including their current projects, training background, work objectives and more, all of which means that aggregating information can be far more usefully applied than in the open web.
Building on the theme of adapting Web 2.0 technologies to be valuable inside organizations, Network Computing has recently published a very good piece titled Can Web 2.0 evolve into an Enterprise Technology? It’s well worth a read. Some of the points it raises:
* Since Web 2.0 gives power to users, it can reduce IT staffing levels. Nutritional products firm Shaklee has reduced IT staff by 20%. It is a significant change issue to have IT staff support these shifts.
Read more →
Predictions for the marketing and media industries in 2008
By Ross DawsonThe December/ January issue of Marketing magazine includes predictions for 2008 from an array of industry commentators, including myself.
One of the quotes they took from me was:
Some of the other predictions for 2008 I made include:
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Strategy in a networked world for professional service firms
By Ross DawsonThe UK magazine Legal Week has just published an article co-authored by myself and Josh Bottomley, the Managing Director of LexisNexis UK, titled Managing a Law Firm: A networked world.
The genesis of the article is that I will be delivering the keynote to a group of Managing Partners of major law firms in London in late February 2008 for an event organized by LexisNexis. As a prelude to the event, I wrote this article in collaboration with Josh.
The article is available on the Legal Week website, and also below.
Managing a Law Firm: A networked world
Five key factors are driving today’s economy:
* client sophistication;
* connection;
* transparency;
* governance; and
* modularisation.
These forces are steering the professional services sector towards commoditisation, where clients perceive minimal differences between most offerings and often squeeze their suppliers on fees. Only legal services suppliers that actively engage their clients in deep, collaborative relationships are able to differentiate themselves.
We suggest four approaches to improve management, customer service and ultimately profitability.
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The convergence of the Internet and TV: how will it happen?
By Ross DawsonSeveral media executives have asked me about the convergence of the Internet and TV over the last couple of months. I now have a nice reference point for them about the short-term obstacles and possible solutions, courtesy of Nick Wingfield in an article in the Wall Street Journal titled The Internet. The TV. They have even created a brief video – as below – to provide a quick overview of the topic.
Nick frames the issue as a series of problems with potential solutions:
THE PROBLEM: Too Many Boxes
THE SOLUTION: Blend Boxes
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Corporate Australia (finally) engages in Web 2.0 and virtual worlds
By Ross DawsonThere was a good article in The Australian on Tuesday titled Taking residence in virtual worlds, which looked at what some of Australia’s leading companies are doing with Web 2.0 technologies. It quoted me:
I have spent much of the last month or so speaking to Australia’s leading companies, technology journalists, and thought leaders in the field in order to uncover the best examples of Enterprise 2.0 in Australia to showcase at Future Exploration Network’s Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum on 19 February 2008 in Sydney. More on what I have uncovered and the event itself shortly – there are many very exciting developments on the forum to share.
Certainly what I have found is that just about every major organization has at least a toe in the Enterprise 2.0 waters at least somewhere within the folds of its operations. One innovator in one of Australia’s largest organizations, with a larger international than domestic presence, told me of a number of interesting initiatives in one of its business units, then said, “but of course we’d be forced to shut it down if the senior executives found out about it.” In other cases initiatives are not deliberately hidden from executives, but they receive no support. However a good proportion of organizations are engaging in officially sanctioned pilots of wikis or blogs, taking steps to make social networking useful, or using other social media tools. The majority are pretty early stage, and not experiments they care to share externally. However we are getting to the point at which there are solid examples of corporates getting real value from Enterprise 2.0 approaches.
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Corporate bloggers set up council to share and promote best practices
By Ross DawsonThis is good. A new organization, the Blog Council, has just launched. To quote their release:
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