Dion Hin­cliffe, Founder and CTO of Hinch­cliffe and Co, well-​​known Enter­prise 2.0 and Web 2.0 blog­ger and cre­ator of the Web 2.0 Uni­ver­sity was the pre­sen­ter for this session.

Unfor­tu­nately, the con­fer­ence wifi went down at the start of the ses­sion, so live­blog­ging went out the win­dow as an option.

To kick off, Dion encour­aged every­one to both use the con­fer­ence backchan­nel to give live feed­back on the ses­sion and to ensure they were using Twit­ter, Face­book and Friend­feed as ways to con­nect into the community.

Dion’s long ses­sion (nearly four hours) covered:

  • State of Enter­prise 2.0
  • The Tools and Plat­forms Scene
  • Best Prac­tices and Cutting-​​Edge Techniques
  • Suc­cess Stories

The State of Enter­prise 2.0

There’s been a change — two years ago, just three peo­ple raised their hands to the ques­tion “how many of you can eas­ily cre­ate a wiki page or blog post on your intranet”. Today, about 90 per cent of the room raised their hands!

That said, the buzz cycle still pre­vails. He declared “Enter­prise 2.0″ as a top-​​down term in a bottom-​​up world. He also showed a Google Trends map­ping of inter­est in the terms social media, enter­prise 2.0 and km 2.0. There is sig­nif­i­cant growth in searches for all these terms. Wikis have sur­passed blogs in terms of search inter­est also, despite an early lead by blogs. Indeed, blog and wiki now exceed phone and email as search terms. Of course, phone and email are well-​​understood tech­nolo­gies and inter­est in them in search terms — peo­ple search­ing for infor­ma­tion on them — are, in Dion’s words, “imperfect”.

Dion sug­gested Enter­prise 2.0 was presently in the “adop­tion chasm”; that point where the lag occurs between early adopters and the early major­ity. He also empha­sised that while blogs and wikis are easy entry points to Enter­prise 2.0, they are not the core of what it’s about. He also noted that across many organ­i­sa­tions, early imple­men­ta­tions are not offi­cial — some­one installs a tool on a server under a desk, or starts up a hosted wiki on a ser­vice. An inter­est­ing point is while SMBs are prov­ing slow to adopt, large organ­i­sa­tion are buy­ing tools today.

Dion showed us a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of early suc­cess sto­ries. Not only the obvi­ous — IBM, SAP, Dres­d­ner Klein­wort Wasser­stein — but also less obvi­ous or less high pro­file — Janssen Cilag, Boston Col­lege and oth­ers. The sto­ries emerg­ing include improved pro­duc­tiv­ity, stronger com­mu­nity and higher adoption.

The lessons learned from the suc­cess sto­ries are begin­ning to accu­mu­late into some iden­ti­fi­able best prac­tices. Network-​​based work­place com­mu­ni­ties can work and some of the pat­terns emerg­ing include:

  • com­mu­nity management
  • social media guide­lines (IBM, SAP and Sun offer use­ful exam­ples, Accen­ture not so much)
  • change man­age­ment methods
  • dri­ving adoption
  • gov­er­nance of E2.0 communities
  • mea­sure­ment of outcomes

The ven­dor space is matur­ing rapidly. All of the major soft­ware ven­dors are now talk­ing about or offer­ing E2.0 prod­ucts — so much so, that they have a lion’s share 80 per cent of the mar­ket. The remain­ing 20 per cent is the zebra corpse for the hun­gry hye­nas in the mar­ket to fight over. These star­tups are pro­vid­ing a lot of value — inher­ent in their own tools or in tools that pig­gy­back on the major ven­dor offerings.

Accord­ing to For­rester in an April 2008 state­ment, Enter­prise 2.0 will be a US$4.3B indus­try by 2013. This rep­re­sents only a five per cent chunk of the enter­prise soft­ware mar­ket, but it’s still a sig­nif­i­cant number.

Flip side

Of course, it’s not all wine and roses. I asked a ques­tion with respect to shut­downs by man­age­ment or organ­i­sa­tions who aren’t ready to con­sider these tools when rogue imple­men­ta­tions are dis­cov­ered. Indeed, cul­ture is a key fac­tor in adop­tion hur­dles, along­side infra­struc­ture and security.

Tools that pro­vide high lever­age value in E2.0 adop­tions are key, as is effi­cient and effec­tive enter­prise search. The gulf between good search on the web and good search inside the wall is significant.

Dion then namechecked The Clue­train Man­i­festo, declar­ing “they were right all along”. This from a book that’s approach­ing it’s 10 year anniver­sary. It remains rel­e­vant and prescient.

Enter­prise 2.0 Redux

Dion reminded us that inno­va­tion in soft­ware and net­works is no longer com­ing from the world of big busi­ness. Rather the inno­va­tion is emerg­ing from activ­ity on the Inter­net. We’ve been through a full boom and bust cycle and come out the other side. That other side is Web 2.0. But the other side is not about the hype and excite­ment and the noise­mak­ers. It’s about the emer­gent best practices.

It was noted that the Enter­prise 2.0 story has emerged from Web 2.0 — it’s reflected in a change in the way things are being done on the web, in a shift of con­trol towards users and in a sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of soft­ware mod­els from com­plex to sim­ple. Asso­ci­ated with these changes is a model change from insti­tu­tional con­trol to con­sumer and peer pro­duc­tion. Dion used the tra­di­tional media as an exam­ple. The mono­lithic organ­i­sa­tions pro­duc­ing tra­di­tional media are being rapidly out­paced by con­sumers pro­duc­ing, dis­trib­ut­ing and con­sum­ing their own media in their own ways.

Tim O’Reilly, whose orig­i­nal clear def­i­n­i­tion of Web 2.0, has now been refined. He now defines Web 2.0 as:

Net­worked appli­ca­tions that explic­itly lever­age net­work effects.

Dion, riff­ing off O’Reilly’s def­i­n­i­tion, went on to explain the power of net­work effects in gen­eral. Where the poten­tial value of a net­work exists, the par­tic­i­pa­tion in that net­work of active indi­vid­u­als — as per Clay Shirky’s Web 2.0 Expo talk — is what really makes the true value. We are largely fail­ing to exploit the cog­ni­tive sur­plus we have in our possession.

Web 2.0 at Work

He also dis­cussed Andrew McAfee’s think­ing on Enter­prise 2.0, which he con­sid­ers crit­i­cal. At it’s core, the notion of apply­ing the “Web 2.0 effect” at work is critical:

  • glob­ally vis­i­ble (which is not every­thing, but every­thing appro­pri­ate), per­sis­tent collaboration
  • use of the tools of the Web 2.0 world
  • putting work­ers into the cen­tre of the con­trib­u­tory world

Indeed, case stud­ies Dion pre­sented indi­cate early Enter­prise 2.0 adopters are see­ing mea­sur­able lev­els of pro­duc­tiv­ity and innovation.

Per­ceived ben­e­fits of Enter­prise 2.0

Dion moved on to sev­eral points that are seen as strong pos­i­tive points around Enter­prise 2.0. They are many, but include:

  • mea­sur­ably increased knowl­edge retention
  • higher KM tool adop­tion (where the tools are the right ones)
  • higher lev­els of productivity

Dion also helped us under­stand what Enter­prise 2.0 con­sists of, using Andrew McAfee’s SLATES mnemonic. In case you’ve not seen it, here it is:

  • Search — the core (and crit­i­cal) abil­ity to find something.
  • Links — noth­ing on the web exists in iso­la­tion. The con­nec­tions between things are a part of the value.
  • Author­ship — grant­ing access to tools for every­one is critical
  • Tags — often derided, they allow peo­ple to apply their own mean­ing to things
  • Exten­sions — the value add in min­ing activ­ity pat­terns, such as Amazon’s “other peo­ple who bought this” functionality
  • Sig­nals — the abil­ity to update and inform of those updates to users

That Dion con­tin­ues to use this set of def­i­n­i­tions indi­cates their ongo­ing importance.

I only stayed for the first half of Dion’s talk. The sec­ond part was about tools, which I guess I under­stand a rea­son­able bit about. Also, there was sig­nif­i­cant activ­ity and buzz in the lobby, which I wanted to be a part of.