IBM bringing Web 2.0 to corporate workers

IBM is set today to make a big push into the Web 2.0 world by unveiling a team collaboration product, social computing software and a suite of tools for building Web mashups, see Computerworld’s article here.

[…] unveiling a team collaboration product, social computing software and a suite of tools for building Web mashups.

As part of a new “Web 2.0 Goes to Work” initiative, the IBM tools will bring popular consumer Web 2.0 technologies like blogs, wikis and social networks to the enterprise, […] The new software should help companies more easily brainstorm and collaborate with partners and customers about business content

[…] Lotus Quickr 8 team collaboration tool helps companies use blogs, wikis and team space templates to share business documents and access libraries through plug-ins […]

[…] IBM today also announced that Lotus Connections is now available.

The Connections tool includes Web 2.0 components like bookmarking and support for social communities

[…] In addition, IBM introduced Info 2.0, a new suite of tools for customizing and linking Web and enterprise data into mashups

While one might argue that this portfolio of tools and suites is too complex and thus distracting, I think that it’s more or less a reflection of the impossibility to design “solutions” with “one true architecture”. What’s needed is a toolbox whose contents can be flexibly combined and adapted. IBM’s efforts are no “out of the box solution” anyway, which is basically good news for consultants in the social software space – remember it’s not about technologies or tools, it’s about organizations and people.

Wiki Wednesday in Stuttgart

Cedric und ich hatten die Idee schon länger, nun machen wir Nägel mit Köpfen: Wir organisieren den ersten Wiki Wednesday in Stuttgart.

Vorläufiger Veranstaltungsort ist das Vinum im Stuttgarter Literaturhaus (Bosch Areal, Nähe Liederhalle). Den Termin werden wir in den nächsten Tagen festlegen … ein Mittwoch wird es sicher sein.

Wer Interesse an der Teilnahme hat, kann sich hier in die Teilnehmerliste eintragen bzw. mir eine Nachricht senden.

Enterprise social software adoption …

Dennis McDonald lays out some of the points he’s picked for his consulting in the social software space:

Importance of “viral” promotion (i.e., no drumbeating from top executives — let the users progress on their own).

Importance of making infrastructure available throughout the organization as a standard set of tools.

Ability of social media to make up for some of the natural limitations of large meetings (e.g., less outspoken people tend to do less well in open meeting settings and may not have the same disincentives to participate when using social media).

Natural emergence of experts.

Recognition that knowledge management and knowledge sharing are critical to innovation.

Recognition that creative people are what differentiates one company from another given the comparability of physical and financial assets among competitors.

Need to occasionally prune and archive inactive material in order to to keep things “fresh.”

I like his take so much, especially when he touches on this big overlap between innovation and social software – that’s my line of thinking and my inspiration (see BMID and frogpond).

Web 2.0 changing decision making processes within organizations

More on Chambers keynote by the people of Avenue A | Razorfish, pointing out his argument that decision making processes (at least at Cisco …) were changed and accelerated:

And when talking about web 2.0 [Chambers] specifically drew attention to social networking as changing decision making processes within organizations.
[…] Chambers emphasized that social networks are changing businesses making them less hierarchical and more network oriented.

Well, yes, strengthening (and leveraging) social networks via social software may facilitate this, decision making can be accelerated (and be more distributed, democratized, deconstructed, diversified, …).

In fact, the main change effect is not acceleration (but the change effects in brackets …).

Alas, be warned, your results may vary, social networking in the enterprise is not “easy”. One reason is that this is not a technology problem (with some kind of tech answer), but a people problem. Supplementing organizational hierarchies and “command and control” decision structures with free-form collaboration and teamwork approaches needs some serious thinking before “kicking-off these projects”, taking into account that this calls for broad implementation approaches, lead and energized by skillful managers, and more …

Then (and only when …) we employ freeform social software and enterprise 2.0 concepts we can ease implementation, like when we leverage bottom-up mechanisms that are already in place, and allow for the emergence of usage and networking patterns that reflect and support the actual informal networks that exist in the organization anyway.

Social software may enter the corporate world quite naturally in the end …

The future is Web 2.0 is collaboration …

… says John Chambers, CEO of Intel calling for businesses to increase knowledge worker productivity by implementing Web 2.0 social software but also by fostering mashups and virtual conferencing.

Here’s a video clip of Chambers Network + Interop keynote. It’s nicely edited and a convincing speech (“preaching the gospel”), so worth a look.

Yet one has to be aware that Chambers is betting on virtual conferencing and presence and aims to attract corporate interest onto Ciscos (WebEx-powered) collaboration approach. Keep that in mind when watching the video and when pondering the future of virtual networked collaboration …

For my part I am reserved whether video is really the killer application among the collaboration tools. Requiring synchronous presence of distributed collaborators is both costly and unnecessary most of the time (think more meetings …) whereas tools for virtual distributed collaboration like wikis are a low-cost approach that can be tailored to the actual needs (think more flexibility and serendipity …).

Interested in implementation of social software for collaboration? To learn more about my hands-on consulting approach contact me …

Accenture gets into Intranet 2.0, another take

Some days ago I noted (much too short) Accenture’s efforts to introduce web 2.0 concepts into their corporate intranet, following a report from IT Business.

Now I’ve read Mike Gottas take on the news, where he basically welcomes the new addition to the “social software business case collection”, while pointing out that:

professional services has always been a pathfinder industry segment when it comes to early adoption of certain technology.

because

Connecting with other people in organizations that essentially “sell know how” is a perfect environment for introducing tools that help with information sharing, communication, collaboration and community-building (e.g., KM).

Yet he warns to see this case as a false positive, something I partially agree with, if only because it’s straight and normal business of IT consultancies to explore “the edges” and to prepare answers before clients ask.

But while exploring the edges of changing technologies is for sure no business any CIO engages in, they might ask Accenture (or other consultants, hint) for advice regarding this “enterprise 2.0”-thing they’ve heard about. So, I wonder whether this will turn out to be just another “case study” or the start of something bigger (like all the other consultancies marketing their very own efforts and experiences …).