acidlabs

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.

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