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Last week, AT&T announced that they are going to move the corporate headquarters from San Antonio to Dallas, TX. This seems like it would be big news; a fortune 10 company moving to a new location. Can you imagine Ford moving his Green River plant to Oklahoma or Mr. Walton moving from Bentonville, AR.? Yet, the AT&T move barely made it to the AP. Why? First, we don't really have "workplaces" anymore. They have been replaced by "workspaces". Does it really matter that the perso ... Dr. Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize for developing his Micro-Lending practice and the creation of the Grameen Bank. The idea is fairy simply in that his company would setup an environment where extremely poor people would be able to get small loans in order to create businesses. He talked to 42 impoverished women from a nearby village and found that they were all hardworking people who were paying outrageous fees to suppliers because they could not pay in cash. Dr. Yunus found ... When researchers speak of Web 2.0 applications, they tend to focus on the technology aspects of the environment. For example, YouTube, Flickr, and Wikipedia are usually proposed as working success stories of Web 2.0. Each of these examples, focus on the delivery of technology. For example, YouTube allows end users to post videos and then use the components of technology to deliver value to the end user. Flickr does the same thing for images and Wikipedia does that does this for terms, p ... Recently, CIO magazine published an article on Collaborative and Social Software. One comment made me think a new was that 80% of implementations fail. I think I am going to disagree with that statement by adding my experience. Only about 40% of actual implementations fail but an astonishing 95% fail to succeed. As I have commented before, there is a big difference between not failing and succeeding. That being said, why does this happen? We in Information Technology have over 30-40 yea ... Watching the news coverage last night of the election, I was intrigued by one particular segment that talked about how, despite unemployment and interest rates being historically low, we seem to be concerned with the economy. The analyst provided many other economics components that when put into historical perspective are quite good. Yet, we all feel like it's the "worse economy in 10 years". So what's going on? While conservatives might blame the panic inducing media, I think something ... Putting together some slides some slides for an upcoming conference, I started to put some thought into the elusive Business Value of Enterprise 2.0. After doing this for the past 4 years, locating examples of business value isn’t really that hard, especially when you have 30,000 case studies to pull from. That being said, I am reminded that not every implementation has that type of history or luxury. Breaking down this concept into two different perspectives, business value can be measure ... Proctor and Gamble had a Research and Development (R&D) team of over 9,000 employees. While they produced some legendary products, the CEO declared that they were not doing enough and with a success rate less than 20%, one could see why. He declared that by the end of 2010, 50% of the R&D efforts would be successful thus increasing productivity by 30%. In order to pull this off, the CEO turned outside the organization for help. That is to say, he turned to Web 2.0 tools for help and gain acce ... The one thing I learned last week in New York City is that you do not cross the Hudson River unless your horn works. The horn is basically an indicator that I am going to go through that intersection regardless if you are standing there or not. I will also say that every New Yorker we talked to was kind and considerate to us. I had the opportunity to address a group of technologists on the merits of moving toward Enterprise 2.0 on a personal, organizational, and enterprise level. ... This months, the Harvard Business Review published an excellent article discussing the right conditions where collaboration can flourish. In large organizations, where the workforce is distributed, there are certain elements that need to be in place to foster collaborative type communications. Members of complex teams are less likely – absent other influences – to share knowledge freely, to learn from one another, to shift workloads flexibly to break unexpected bottlenecks, ... Regardless of your position, role, responsibility, there is one thing that you can be sure of in our environment. You are part of one or more business models within the enterprise. The bottom line is that all of us provide some form of service to either outside entities or internal customers. Take a look at the following model and see how many of the boxes you can fill in with your own model.
I am still stuck on the differences between Communication, Coordination, Cooperation and Collaboration. I need an analogy to use to demonstrate what it means when two disparate teams actually collaborate together. Imagine Main Street in some little town in North Carolina. On one side of the street is Johnson and Son’s Fine Bakery and on the other side of the street is Marilyn’s Cakes and Treats. Up until now, they have co-existed in peaceful harmony. But look out, the city council is goi ... I am making my Web 2.0 overview available online at http://ww.rtodd.com. Chapter three (Trademark 2.0) focused on reviewing the impact of Web 2.0 to our business, organizational, and personal lives. The chapter takes an in-depth review of the technologies and social requirements in order to deliver value t ... Folks might be wondering why I haven’t posted as much over the past few weeks as I did in the prior months. Perhaps, I have run out of things to say about Collaboration, Sharepoint, or Social Software. Well, that clearly isn’t the case but I do have a good reason: work. We must have hit a tipping point inside the company and demand has sky rocketed. Our team is working 12 hours a day just to try to keep up with the enormous demand for our products and services. Our collaborative sites ha ... Here are 11 Enterprise Case Studies found on the web. The details vary by author but most can give you some good ideas on your implementation. Also, don’t forget the ones being collected by the Social Text Wiki. 1. Wells Fargo After my fifth phone call and email on this topic, I think it’s time to create an informative post on a confusing topic. Can Sharepoint and Social Software exist in the same environment or must you choose one or the other. The first step in answering this question is to layout a framework for the components of Enterprise 2.0 and see how Sharepoint matches up. Using Dion Hinchcliff’s model as a guide here are the basic components. The ... No one can say for sure that Social Software or Collaborative technologies are going to take off inside your company at this point in time. We can say, with great certainty, that the company will eventually embrace these technologies. The one question that will continue to come up over and over again is how can I use these tools in my business model? Here are five ideas that might help you think about where and how. Locate New Customers for My Products and Services ... Last week an “Enterprise 2.0” consultant called to chat about what he could to for me and my enterprise. I don’t really think he did his homework to know who he was talking to but I enjoyed his 15 minute overview of Web 2.0 within the organizational context. This consultant assumed that I would be impressed that they had spoken on the topic and even had one of the 75 million weblogs. Finally, after allowing this conversation to slow, I asked the most important question you can ask of your ... The Economist Intelligence Unit has released a report entitled “Serious Business: Web 2.0 goes Corporate”. The research polled 406 senior executives from around the world on the impact of Web 2.0 on their businesses. According to the survey: In fact, according to our survey, 31% of companies think that use of the web as a platform for sharing and collaboratio ... This is the second post in a series focusing on how to get the message out to the user community. This channel focuses on how to educate people on the collaborative solution or offering. Here is a link to the first post focusing on the technology channels. Brown Bags The first review of "Trademark 2.0: Defining Your value in a Web 2.0 World" has come in and it's not bad at all. Thanks to Daragh O'Brien for his kind comments. He has recently published a book that sets out a recipe for establishing your personal brand (he uses the term trademark for a variety of reasons). Part of his thesis is that the collaborative tools of Web2.0 (the Read/Write Web as it is often called). What sets this book apa ... Wow, this look interesting. A Web 2.0 Bootcamp focusing on 7 major patterns of Web 2.0 applications, the structure and business models of Web 2.0, and how Web 2.0 concepts are applied directly to the design and development of online products and services. Business model coverage includes The Long Tail, crowdsourcing, Data as the Next “Intel Inside”, community ecosystems, and other proven ways of using strategic Web 2.0 approaches for commercial success, market leadership, and competitive dis ... As mentioned in earlier posts that awareness and education are two of the most important hurdles to overcome when deploying Collaborative Software in the enterprise. This weblog entry is the first of four entries on ways that you can communicate your offering and value via channels: Technology Channel, Education Channel, Communication Channel, and Other Channels. Let’s start with the technology channels since that is one of the easiest ones to do. We will assume that we have developed a sin ... With apologies to David Coverdale, “Here I go again”. The problem with organizations today is that they are built upon vertical, top down hierarchal structures. This may make it easier to merge large organizations but can create havoc in building long term business value in the 21st century. Yes, top down direction is still important but we also must consider “enabling and motivating self-directed, thinking-intensive, professionals and managers” to work with each other horizontally and dia ... One of the things that seems to undisputable is that the productivity of the enterprise continues to increase year by year. The basic reason for this is the reduction of interaction and transaction costs within different organizations. Nobel Prize economist Ronald Coase is the first economist of any consequence who has anything useful to say about information economics. Coase studied why organizations are formed, what guides their growth and what leads to their demise. He observed that com ... According to the US Department of Labor, we will need to retrain 75% of the workforce in new technology and new methods of doing business. 80% of all jobs will require some form of post secondary education by 2015. The time of abundant resources is gone and most companies have to look overseas to locate educated, productive, and available resources. We are not prepared to grow our companies unless we turn the tide of Executive MBA educations which may take us to a more efficient but irrelev ...
First, email is a one-to-one communication medium. Even if you include several people in the email then it’s still a one-to-few communication medium. Collaboration is a many ... Driving through rural Georgia is always interesting as it brings back emotions of nostalgia with scenes of the past. You can hardly pass through a town without being reminded of life 50 years ago. There is always an old church located just on the out skirts of town. The county court house is located in the center of town with a one way street that loops around the building. Retail stores align the road like dominoes. These small entrepreneur shops defined the work ethic and way of life f ... How are you going to run your Social Software program; as a cost center or a revenue generating program? No, you can’t cop out and say both. At the end of the day, you need to pick on or the other. If you choose cost center then you need to focus your energy on constraining the program. Management is about containment, so running as a cost center makes a lot of sense. You can cut down on the software and choose the lowest cost provider. You can purchase the lowest cost infrastructure an ... Last month, I posted a quote from Eric Shinseki “"If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less" which sums up the basic message of Enterprise 2.0. The one thing I forgot to do is to introduce myself; I am change. I am change. I work for you, with you, and along side of you. I am your partner and competitor. I am an opportunity and a threat. I am a Lion and you are the Gazelle. I will not come at you straight ahead and announce my arrival with an executive ... There are many examples of organizations that have been completely transformed themselves over the past few years; none as much as the photography industry. Just about every component of the ecosystem has been transformed or been reinvented. Not only has the technology changed but our behavior and habits have been transformed. Take the camera; once you loaded film inside and could take 20 pictures in hopes for a good one. Now, you can take hundreds of pictures and simply delete the ones y ... We have two paths of organization and corporate strategy in our world and they rarely seem to co-exist. You innovate, create, and destroy your old business before anyone else can. This will force you to think outside of the box and realize that success is fleeting. It took decades to build up a manufacturing plant and enable capacity. However, today your business can be re-engineered in a matter of days. Other organizations focus on standardization, creating incremental improvements, and ... Will Enterprise 2.0 do more harm than good? The obvious answer is no but management has a way of screwing things up. With the advancements in technology and a little elbow grease, we are now able to deliver executive dashboards with up to the minute information on sales, ordering, status, etc. In fact, we push and push to reduce the latency of the information just for this reason. We will spend millions of dollars to reinvent business process just so we can see an up to the second picture ...
Since your organization is rolling out Social Software, now is the time to ...
That’s a good question that many of us are afraid or unable to answer. That being said, I’ll propose one methodology for analyzing this question. I think it’s fair to say that the majority of the organization rides together, like a swarm of bees. We can make generalities about the enterprise population in order to determine where they stand on certain things. For example, I can survey my employee group and note that 89% drive to work. While 11% work from home, ride share, or use public t ...
An updated version of "What Happens When" has been posted on Slideshare. Added eight more examples of companies gaining a strategic advantage using Web 2.0. ...
Recently, Joseph Pine and I exchanged emails which always make me think beyond the obvious. He and his co-author make you re-think the basic ideas of value creation. While I think I am late to the game with this observation, I will continue with my rendition of it. I am a technologist, and I understand the basic value creation of information and metadata. But I failed to connect the most obvious of ideas with Web 2.0 and the associated techn ... Another way to look at Enterprise 2.0 adoption is to review the reasons people are not using the Enterprise 2.0 services. Most organizations like to survey their current customers to understand why they are using them. However, this seems to be self defeating but also depends on the level of maturity. The key is to survey the user community and here are three possible scenarios. I could have picked any tool but for demonstration, I’ll choose Microsoft’s Sharepoint as the example: ...
2. Communicate and Create an Open Organization. The essence of Enterprise 2.0 is the creation of an open organization where communications and value can emer ... Everyone one wants a Return on Investment model for collaboration and social software. Just to let you know, there are hundreds of such models out there for traditional information technology type programs. One quick ROI is to replace business unit Intranets with collaborative software. This isn’t as obvious as it might seem to us since most people can’t separate from the command and control model of Intranet applications. Information Technology won’t really support this move since it red ... Social Computing Magazine has picked up two of the Blog Posts here at Collaborage. They have published the fifteen ways to utilize a wiki as well as the fifteen ways to use a blog in the corporate environment. What other ways have you seen these tools being used? Here are fifteen ways in which organizations need to run their corporate Web 2.0 implementation as a business. 1. Investment Capital 2. Real Customers 3. Suppliers Please tell me someone didn’t put together an IQ test on Web 2.0 that reflects nothing but the pure technology view. Here is what the author says about you based on how many questions you get right. Get eight to 10 questions right and you're a Web 2.0 Wizard. Five to seven, your just the average surfer. Four or less? Web? What, is there a spider on me?Feel free to take this te ... Here are a couple of interesting items from the Enterprise 2.0 conference held in Boston, MA. which was held this week. First, is Ross Mayfield’s interactive notes from the How to Build an Enterprise 2.0 Platform Employees Will Use session. Very interesting, I really picked up on a few key points: 1. Integrating people, processes and data and making the communications a core part of the effort Excellent. Social Computing Magazine has picked up one of the Blog Posts here on Collaborage. This is an excellent advancement since it indicates that people are interested in actual case studies and real world experience. One of the basic things I observed with my years in the Metadata space is that people want to see what works, not theory but real world Fortune 500 company experience. I make no apologies for being a rabid fan of the “The Experience Economy” book written by Pine and Gilmore. The insight and forward looking research has literally changed how we look at business and technology. The basic premise is that quality products and customer service are no longer differentiators of value. They are simply the price of entry in every busines ... They call it the tipping point which a phrase popularized by Malcom Gladwells’s book called The Tipping Point. In social terms, a tipping point is the event where a previously rare phenomenon becomes rapid and dramatically more common to the end user community. For Collaborative and Social Software this rare event is actually utilizing the software for more than a curious glance. It is more along the lines of truly replacing the business functionality and creating a defined value add. The ... 1. The need to be in Perceived Control of their Environment Great Job on defining the new productive worker within Enterprise 2.0. Last year, we spent quite a bit of time taking a long look at what is takes to compete in the next 20 years as a high performing information worker. The advent of Web 2.0 and other social technologies are changing how we look at productivity and this slideshow does a simple but effective job. 1. Aggregation of User Contributed Content Once commented how I transformed Metadata into a principle architecture within the enterprise. The question revolved around how I convinced 100 architects to accept this new way of thinking? Truth be told, I didn’t have to convince 100, only 2. The key was to locate those influential individuals and based on their actions, others would follow. Since many cases Enterprise 2.0 revolves not around the technology but around the culture and behavior issues, we need to locate those key ... In Web 1.0 organizations defined who the winners and losers were going to be. They defined the rules of play, rules of engagement, and framework of the eco-system. Standard products, delivered globally, and manufactured in mass. The soft drink industry provides a great example where the winners and losers were defined by the market penetration of global proportions. The winners were Coke and Pepsi and only the best of the best could compete for the customer’s attention. In Web 2 ... Tom Peters published on this topic in his 1997 Fast Company Article called “A Brand Called You”. The essence of Mr. Peters message is that you are in charge of your brand and that all of us can own some part of the market. Everyone can learn, and educate themselves to become, at some level, an expert. The vast majority of knowledge is available on the Internet and if you look hard enough you can find information pertaining to your specific situation. Almost 10 years after the article, the m ... 1. Establish your Expertise and Define your Professional Trademarks 1. Friends and Family (Personal Network) The IT Innovator Don Tapscott suggested a term “Prosumer” to describe the blurring gap between the producer and consumer of a product or service. On the surface, this sounds like an important discovery and it is in the outside world. Clearly, organizations are using social software to drive adoption, marketing, and innovation within their industry. The instantaneous feedback organizations get from the consumers of their product create an environment that is conducive to the most agile of e ... 1. Announcing Company News and Events 1. Intranet Replacement; Open Access and Collaborative. An easy win… You have to be better than YouTube, MySpace and Wikipedia. If you take the average contributor rate in these organizations, as compared to the reader population, you will get some number around 0.16%. No, that’s not 16%, it is around a tenth of one percent. When you world includes billions of people then 0.16% produces a very large population of contributors to your social world. However, in a 100,000 person firm, you are talking 100 people. Doubtful that your CEO is going to spend too many r ... 1. Executive Communications 1. Collecting Business and Technical Requirements A couple days ago, I posted that there were two types of Enterprise 2.0 customers or opportunities. I was wrong, dead wrong. The “engaged” and the “not engaged” left out the group that is currently “being engaged”. How silly of me to forget that there is a transition period where everything you do is being showcased. That amount of time where the individual is just getting started. We can classify this group into three service offerings just like Kroger does when they checkout a c ... Within the collaborative space we can classify customers into those that have been engaged and those that have not. Let’s first look at the ones that have not engaged your Enterprise 2.0 effort. We can classify these users into the three different areas and define the cause. The first group of users that have not engaged your effort are the ones that have never heard of you, your product, or services. Here you have a Marketing and Branding problem. Your ... From one of my previous posts, I made reference to how odd it is that we spend over 90% of our time talking about something that will only have a 10% impact on your implementation; namely, tool selection. Take wikis for example, you have several choices between collaborative products like Sharepoint, focused products like Social Text, and open source products like XWiki. So in the words of Charlie Daniels: Boy let me tell you what: I bet you didn't know it, but I'm a fiddle ... By now you have probably heard of Web 2.0 and all of the hype surrounding the next evolution of web technology. The impact on our culture is unmistakable with the advent of Weblogs, Wikis, and many other social applications. While Web 2.0 has been debated by researchers as to who and when the concepts emerged, little argument exists that the technology has arrived. Unlike Web 1.0, this new technology encourages user participation and derives its greatest value when large communities contri ... When implementing collaborative or social applications within the enterprise, four scenarios emerge where you can provide service. Education Opportunity: A customer has never heard of collaborative or social software, what the functional purpose is, or the value created with collaborative software. Here we have an educational gap that can be addressed with presentations, white papers, executive overviews, newsletter additions, and other marketing efforts. < ... Suppose I go online and order a brand new F-150 pickup truck. Everyone in Georgia has a pickup truck; it’s a state law. The price, including all of the additions, is around $30,000. I drive that truck one mile down the road, now what is the value of that truck? My guess would be around $25,000. That first mile is a killer from a value perspective. In most cases when we consume products and service the value decreases along side. Not any more; organizations are beginning to figu ... One of the missing components of most implementations of Collaborative and Social Software is the responsibility for the success or failure of the effort. That sounds a bit harsh, but regularly, I fail see the components of a vision, mission, metrics, roadmaps, or game plans. It simply goes back to the concept that if the software is loaded on a server then we are done. Unfortunately, that is at best, short sighted. So, what is our vision? Collaboration and Online Service ... Animal Planet is a great resource of business metaphors and last night had a great show on Dolphins. One of their favorite foods is herring which forms a giant ball when attacked. The thinking is that if they come together, they will appear to be bigger and a more formidable foe. Unfortunately, thousands of years of evolution and basic instincts plays right into the Dolphins hands, I mean fins. The tightly packed school of herring creates an undersea McDonalds; fast food for Flipper. I w ... |
Over the years, our organization has deployed almost 35 knowledge stores including the Metadata Repository that won us several industry awards. One of the secrets was always having a champion involved in the project. This person may have been a repository champion but it was far more important to have a producer or consumer champion. In the Enterprise 2.0 world this would be someone who cha ...
Remember the old days when people were selling domain names for millions of dollars? How much did http://www.cookies.com go for? I actually sold one for $2,500; not bad for a $20.00 investment. While domains may not be as critical as they were before Google, they still play an important role on the Intranet.
1. Wiki Page Count
