An Accenture survey has interesting key findings:
Managers spend up to two hours a day searching for information, and more than 50 percent of the information they obtain has no value to them. In addition, only half of all managers believe their companies do a good job in governing information distribution or have established adequate processes to determine what data each part of an organization needs.
Via Thomas N. Burg c/o randgänge, ein weiterer Grund warum Social Software in the Enterprise ein Thema für mehr Organisationen sein sollte, die 3/2 rule of employee productivity:
The more employees your company has, the less productive each of these employees are. It is a generalization, of course, but a useful one and one that is confirmed by most people who have worked for growing organizations. As the company grows, so does the internal processes and the layers of bureaucracy, and the time spent on communications grows rapidly.
Das ist natürlich radikal vereinfacht, für Organisationstheoretiker keine Neuigkeit, die Ergebnisse sind nicht über alle Größenklassen von Unternehmen verallgemeinerbar etc. Gleichzeitig ist es aber auch ein guter Grund Zusammenarbeit und Kommunikation besser zu unterstützen …
More on the marketing side of enterprise 2.0, this is interesting:
[…] enterprise software vendors [should] focus on ease of adoption, instantaneous value and a minimum IT footprint
[…]
[…] vendors need to make it easy for users to get started and provide real value to the customer before she is required to pay. The user experience should be personalized and contextualized and the product should spread through the enterprise organically, via user recommendation, rather than by management edict.
But unless Francois I don’t think that most Enterprise 2.0 tools will remain confined to geek-heavy groups, and this for good reason, as (again) McAfee holds:
these tools will be competitive differentiators, [not just] levelers
Thomas Otter offers some insight into SAPs experiences and implementation exercises with wikis (like at SDN). Yes, this is emergence in action, and yes it will probably fundamentally change how software is developed, supported and marketed.
But that he points out this post by Jeff Walker of Atlassian (“How to Ruin a Perfectly Fine Product with Marketing”) on the pros and cons of marketing is more important, because establishing these tools needs “marketing firepower” that Google and Microsoft can and will deliver:
[…] I do like both Microsoft and Google. Why? Because they are about to commoditize wikis for the masses and educate another 10 – 50 million people on wikis. In rather different ways. Wikis, which without doubt are one of the two killer apps to emerge from Web 2.0 Wonderland, along with blogs, will be spread and will benefit from the massive marketing budgets and reach of the Evil Empire and Do No Evil. (Jeff Walker)
This is interesting, pointing out a study and benchmark on how enterprises are supporting their virtual workforce (e.g. by shared workspaces for collaboration (real-time- and non-real time applications), some early results:
– 90% of enterprises consider themselves “virtual”, that is, they operate organizations in which team members work in separate geographic locations.
– Revenue growth and boosting employee productivity were the biggest drivers for collaboration projects.
– Demand for collaboration applications is primarily end-user driven.
– Enterprises are moving toward unifying their planning for collaboration and convergence.
and
The bottom line for enterprises and those wishing to sell into the enterprise market is that enterprises seem to understand the opportunity that collaborative applications present to improve their operations, and the demand is pull-based rather than push-based.
Leider nicht sehr konkret, ein Einblick in die Einsatzkriterien für Social Software von IBM, gefunden im CIO Weblog:
Der Reifegrad von Blogs oder Wikis wird bei uns daran gemessen, wie gut entsprechende Anwendungen die Mitarbeiter dabei unterstützen, die wichtigen im Unternehmen vorhandenen Informationen zu finden, zu verknüpfen, und zu neuen Entscheidungsgrundlagen zu machen
Eine Arena von IBM-internen Blogs, Wikis und anderen Web 2.0-Werkzeugen ist Innovationsmanagement bzw. konkret das Unterstützen von Innovation Jams:
Mit so genannten “Jams” (z.B. “Innovation Jam” oder “Company Jam”) werde sowohl die Zusammenarbeit innerhalb des Unternehmens als auch die mit Kunden massiv gefördert. Ein “Jam” ist eine virtuelle, webgestützte Diskussion, bei der “Best practice”-Ideen generiert, eingesammelt und demokratisch ausgewählt werden.
Luis Suarez promises to offer some insights and reflections into Lotus Connections, i.e. Dogear, Roller, Profiles etc.
Looking forward to it, Luis.
And yes, it’s interesting to see whether IBM will offer this as a packaged, integrated solution or if they will push this via the consulting guys? Technology issues are important, but the real groundwork must be done in implementation (and change management).