Ross Mayfield's Weblog

2009 Predictions: Collaboration and Social Networking

Forrester analyst Gil Yehuda offers a perspective of Enterprise 2.0 collaboration as either driven by IT, or from the bottom up by the Line of Business, what he calls tech populist.  And given the present recession, offers an outlook:

I predict that IT-driven internal collaboration initiatives will be squeezed tight: 1. they are usually more expensive than the Tech Populist options. 2. IT is being asked to sacrifice projects, and they would rather cut fat, not bone. Meaning, they’d rather protect their bread-and-butter IT infrastructure from being outsourced. And 3.The business considers projects initiated by IT to be less vital. Remember who pays the bills.

However, for business-driven internal enterprise Web 2.0 collaboration projects, I see growth. Why?  Because the business will find their collaboration needs to grow in 2009, while they see IT providing them with fewer services. Collaboration needs grow as a result of layoffs, mergers, and deepening external partnerships (requiring new infrastructure to collaborate outside the firewall with trusted, external partners).  And this happens while IT’s services shrink as a result of layoffs, a focus on streamlining operational costs, while not taking on new projects.

Who wins? The SaaS based collaboration vendors: folks like Box.net, GroupSwim, Jive, OneHub, PBwiki, SocialCast, Socialtext, and others who provide collaboration services in the cloud for about $5-$15 per user per month, give or take. These products range in functionality, where some focus on the wiki, others on the social network, and still others are more suited for file sharing within trusted groups. But these are easy pickings for business that are looking to circumvent IT and set up a small departmental solution. Especially in departments that are looking to collaborate with a few external partners.

Line of Business implementations not only experience growth, but greater success. According to this year's McKinsey survey on Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise, IT-driven implementations had 60% user dissatisfaction, whereas LoB-driven had 74% satisfaction.  Part of this is vendor selection, but LoB implementations have greater engagement and adoption.  I believe the best approach is to partner LoB with IT, what I once called middlespace, for the benefits of top down and bottom up adoption.

Gil also predicts a battle of 2009:

And now, the battle. The story above works for companies that are willing to move to SaaS based products to address near term collaboration need in 2009. But many organizations cannot, or will not, allow themselves to house their intellectual property on someone else’s servers – no matter what the vendor says to assure them. This means that organizations with hard-line IT shops will face a battle between IT and the business for a collaboration solution that integrates with IT’s existing infrastructure, but requires little IT involvement.

Okay, now I'm just tooting my own horn.  Socialtext is the only vendor with a SaaS Appliance, meeting behind-the-firewall policies with SaaS benefits such as right-sizing the application subscription.  I think Gil is right that LoB collaboration will grow next year through SaaS. As they are successful they will partner with IT and migrate the cloud behind the firewall as necessary.

Wikis and Document Management Systems

Michael Idinopolus has a good post exploring the differences and complements of wikis and document management systems.

...The two activities get confused because document management, like collaboration, involves creation of content by multiple people. For many companies, the DMS is the first tool they implemented that enabled more than one person to touch a single, centrally stored piece of content. And the document management vendors began to capitalize on the opportunity by introducing document-centric team rooms (like Documentum's eRooms, for example.) As a result, many companies began to use the DMS as a collaboration tool. The DMS wasn't very good at it. It required every piece of collaborative content to be saved as a document. Search was cludgy or non-existent, and everything had to be filed in a nested folder structure. But it was better than nothing, or email.

Last week I saw first-hand a good example of this phenomenon recently at a major executive search firm. They wanted a way to collaboratively publish questions, comments, slides, bios, etc., and engineered an entire intranet around eRooms. It was cludgy, and adopted primarily by power users who took the time to create a Byzantine taxonomy of folders and sub-folders.

All of which brings me back to my meeting with the retail bank. When asked about the relationship between DMS and collaboration tools, what I said was that some of the content in a typical DMS really belongs there. These are the documents associated with highly regulated processes. But most of the content in a typical DMS--to-do lists, meeting notes, press clippings, conversations, working papers, personal observations--doesn't really belong there. It's in the DMS because there was no good place to put it. That's where a collaboration suite can do a much better job. A good collaboration suite can liberate that content from the tyranny of documents and nested folders, and will encourage people to use it for actual working materials...

He goes on to discuss integration and conclude by saying "Use your document management system to manage documents, and use your collaboration suite to collaborate." Which is obvious unless you are stuck between systems as most people are these days.

But something else occurred to me when reading this passage:

Collaboration, by contrast, is all about people working together to share ideas, notes, questions, comments, etc. Collaboration does not typically follow a standard process; it is much more free-form and free-flowing. Documents are not typically the format of choice. Asking a question or creating a meeting agenda or to-do list doesn't require a document; it just requires typing some words and putting them where other people can see and edit them. That's why so many people simply fire off an email when they collaborate; it spares them the unnecessary step of creating a document.

I've written a lot about how we bend email into everything, and Michael says things need less bending with emails than documents.  But I don't think I've emphasized enough the transition from document-centric to message-centric to people-centric. 

Enterprise 2.0 lets us shift things from documents and emails because not only in many cases its easier, but better.  We connect and remember messages in context.  And the most important context includes people to make it social.  The atomization of the web has largely happened and the enterprise is next. 

As it does, practices change.  We find that reporting as side activities in documents is not only inefficient, but less effective.  Models of building stocks turn into flows of context.

Something better left for someone else to explore is how major shifts in modalities shift how we think.  The constraints and formality of the business memo vs. the conversations and decreasing formality of email vs. transparency and memory of social software.  The act of writing in mediums of messages must change us.

Enterprise 2.008

Interesting times at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston this week.  The conference has become the core of our little but growing industry.  Recall if you will that it started as the Collaborative Technologies Conference in 2005, when organizer Jen Pahlka noted in the kickoff:

Interop is the genesis of this conference, even the first shows had a collaboration thread.  But most of Interop focuses on IT.  Business side of collaboration is the harder problem to solve, the focus of this event and one of the goals is to credentialize the concept of collaboration.

Shortly after, collaboration emerged as a strategic imperative for enterprises.  And the state of the art for solving line of business collaboration continues to evolve.

Vendor Sports

A big change from back then is the vendor sports.  Susan Scrupski saw a difference in how three of the top four enterprise software vendors (IBM, Microsoft & Oracle) were major sponsors.  These big companies may be the drag queens of Enterprise 2.0,  and an old French proverb says "they are not free who drag their chains after them," but everyones major vendor sports (otherwise we wouldn't be reading so much about Microo).

The backchannel was particularly damning of Sharepoint compared to Lotus Connections (release 2.0 around the corner) and Microsoft got slammed again in a later panel.  Sharepoint is stuck between major releases (that is, until the forced upgrade of Office 42.0), and Lawrence Liu is doing his best without a social software leg to stand on.  Oracle didn't do any better or get kid glove treatment.  All this made for good entertainment, but I'd take a McAfee-Davenport debate over all this.

E2Open

In stark contrast to the vendor sports and paid speaking slots was Enterprise2Open.  Two people tried to hold sessions pitching their companies, and the law of two feet worked against them.  There were solid conversations on adoption, use cases, business cases and edge cases like gaming.  It provided a pressure relief valve for the structure of the commercial event, enabling Booz Allen Hamilton and BearingPoint to share their implementation stories that didn't get on the program for example. About half of the attendees has been at a Barcamp before, some came only for this free portion of the event and while there were self-organized hiccups, participants valued the experience. 

There are some things I learned to refine it.  I was purposely hands off in facilitation, but there should be an available host in some sessions, particularly merged ones.  Format follows space, and having a major stage for one room lead to broadcasted presentations, where by contrast the room where people naturally circled chairs was more conversational.  Time was left to one afternoon, and we could have had more, as well as more concurrent sessions.  Next year it may be more suited to run in parallel to the workshops and I'm looking for further feedback.

Adoption and Markets

A common thread for customers, facilitators and vendors was on adoption and culture.  There were a lot of IT managers in attendance sharing the failures of their utility deployments.  One open space session spent most of the time listing barriers to adoption.

AIIM research presented the results of their adoption survey in the keynote before mine.  Among their findings was age doesn't matter (Boomers vs. Milennials), some early IT adopters are frustrated and those who adopted KM were more inclined towards Enterprise 2.0.  Other analyst firms (Gartner, Forrester) have psychodemogaphic profiles of organizations that can aid vendors in identifying earlier targets. 

But as I remarked in my keynote, if we limit the market to the KM-inclined, we will go the way of KM.  I believe there are several issues here:

• Early IT Adoption frustration comes from IT-driven deployments.  Previous bottom up demand from PCs, Spreadsheets, LANs, email and instant messaging was met by rolling it out as a utility.  But unlike email or IM, this isn't a communication tool, collaboration requires engagement with the line of business.  IT is good at the engagement required for process modeling and hard coding structured workflows.   But the unstructured and collaborative nature of these tools requires line of business leadership, partnership with IT and applying best practices that are deeper than patterns.  Simply opening up a wiki utility for people to consume results in a 1,000 dead wikis.
• Generations may not matter, but they are different.  While there is no doubt about the social software proclivity of NetGens, and their demand for working this way, a more blended solution needs to address all generations.
• Some of the best implementations are happening where they shouldn't.  One of our favorite customers has a self-described command-and-control culture.  The best sessions at the Enterprise 2.0 conference were the case studies of cultures where people get "slapped down" for sharing (the CIA Intellipedia), highly regulated (Wacovia) and security-conscious (Lockheed-Martin).

Flow and Solutions

In my talk I noted the evolution of Enterprise 2.0 use cases:

• 2002: techies for project communication
• 2004: business user alternative to email
• 2006: internal Wikipedia
• 2008: process-specific solutions

The Wikipedia-inside use case is representative of most Enterprise 2.0 implementations today, not just wikis, what Michael Idinopolus calls above-the-flow:

• In-the-Flow wikis enable people do their day-to-day work in the wiki itself. These wikis are typically replacing email, virtual team rooms, and project management systems.

• Above-the-Flow wikis invite users to step out of the daily flow of work and reflect, codify, and share something about what they do. These wikis are typically replacing knowledge management systems (or creating knowledge management systems for the first time).

Above-the-flow generally has a softer ROI, involves what can be at least perceived as a side activity and different and more difficult adoption characteristics.  Adoption is closer to community building, but in the context where many forces want to work against the community.  When it does succeed, and with the right practices it does, the benefits are worthwhile.  But I believe that above-the-flow is less than half the opportunity for employees, partners and customers.

This is where in-the-flow solutions come in.  They speak to real business problems, can be repeatably implemented and adopted with the right practices, have harder ROI and are process-specific.  Making them work requires coaching and management consulting services that are rare today.

Through in-the-flow and above-the-flow solutions, use of Enterprise 2.0 tools and practices will be as common for knowledge workers in ten years as the PC is today.  In 2.018, feel free to fact check me on this.

Process and Practice

Clay Shirky said business process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity.    Traditional enterprise software serves the goal of automating business process to drive down cost. I've held for some time that your average knowledge worker spends most of their time handling exceptions to process not executing it and augmenting those activities is an opportunity for social software. 

Mike Gotta chatted some golden nuggets during my talk that process is the way work should be done - work practices are how work is done (localized to a given situational context ... Some processes need work practices to be precise, other processes have more elasticity ... the more elastic a process is, the greater the opportunity to apply participatory applications.

And he is right, especially about work practices, except we have to consider:

• Most processes are out of date almost as soon as they are defined because of changes to the environment
• Many processes are defined in ways that current executors can't understand and nobody knows who authored them
• Many more processes are barely written down

Broadly, software that supports work practices, implemented with best practices, enables better decisions, faster cycle and resolution times and adaptivity.  I no longer believe we are headed towards an end of process (although that was a stimulating conversation).  Because of social software, I do believe that we will  redesign most processes with more transparency and participation -- and work practices will finally have context-aware tools that augment them and best practices will gain continual improvement through execution itself.

This post is too long

I was going to conclude with how SocialCalc relates to all this, but that's for the next post.  My last post, btw, is my presentation at the conference.

Elevating the Enterprise 2.0 Conversation

UPDATE: Video of the keynote

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Abstract: The past five years have held tremendous innovation in enterprise software, an industry not known for its innovation relative to other areas of the technology sector. Enterprise 2.0 has challenged preconceptions and created innovative products. But of more interest, the use cases have evolved and practices are enabling new solutions that offer competitive advantage. Its time to elevate the conversation beyond features (wiki, blog, RSS, social networking, etc.), put aside the hype and talk about what problems the Enteprise 2.0 community is uniquely prepared to solve. In this keynote, Socialtext Chairman, President & Co-founder Ross Mayfield will share his insights from the past five years in business, and look to the next.

Will Enteprise 2.0 Change the Communications of SMEs?

Gary Kim from TMC IP Telephony wonders if the rise of Enterprise 2.0 collaboration tools will change the communications requirements of SMEs.  While he gets bottom-up and top-down backward to me (things emerge into the enterprise from the bottom-up, and please don't call enterprise to SME to edu to consumer trickling down).  Its interesting to consider if there will be new problems or opportunities down the stack.

So maybe most providers of communications services to SMEs will not see a direct change in requirements as Web 2.0 changes the ways enterprises communicate, which in turn affects the way smaller businesses communicate.

 

In the end, perhaps the communications requirements simply are as simple as faster broadband with better quality of service; more mobile broadband and greater reliance on Web access.

 

In that case, use of social media tools will not be directly translate into materially different voice and data needs in the SME space, in a qualitative sense, with one salient exception. Quality of service mechanisms, more-precise class of service support and application-specific priorities will be more important.

 

Initially though, social media might change demand in a quantitative sense. People will simply be asking for "more."

I'd disagree about the exception, as the World of Ends doesn't stop at the enterprise firewall.  We're coming in at port 80, and while there are app specific priorities, quantity will matter over quality in this sense, and don't bother incurring the cost of throttling quantity at a granular level..  So far, the virtue is lightweight and web native. 

But Gary also got me thinking that there should be another class of Enterprise 2.0 tools in the future that will have different voice and data requirements.  Think Web 2.0 built on Asterix instead of Apache.  So far we have had consumer innovation in Skype, Jaxtr and Jott, innovations like Angel.com for IVR for business, but can someone point me to group-centric models of VoIP Social Software? 

Or are we going to keep freeloading off of FreeConference.com without re-defining group voice for the consumers or business?  I see a lot more happening around Web and Enterprise video than I hear otherwise.

Enterprise Social Software doesn't get you laid, it gets you promoted

It seems some of my fellow enterprise software bloggers are missing the point in Robert Scoble's post.  The consumerization of the enterprise is one of the bigger trends reshaping enterprise software.  Ask any user of enterprise software if they love it and the answer is no.  This will increasingly matter attracting and retaining employees.  Especially as NetGens enter the workforce, the biggest demographic shift since the Baby Boomers, and the fact that they choice in tools to get most of their work done.

Enterprise software can do better.  In fact it has to, because of broader competition.  At least with basic usability.  And with due bravery to buyers about the actual return with users are served.  Step out of the feature matrix.  Also recognize that control instincts lead to unusable crap that is a barrier to collaboration.  And every enterprise software app is a collaboration app, otherwise its infrastructure.

What works against doing better is how institutional procurement will always demand direct relationship and mass customization.  Whereas consumers need less customization (nare I say fads) and are served at a high volume, where intimacy is achieved through brands.

We're experimenting at the margin with new models such as SaaS and Open Source, which needs to appeal to people instead of institutional procurement.  It may be the first way into an institutional sale, and it does have different demands.  But the inherent lack of focus for a vendor, between consumers who happen to work in enterprises and the institutions that bind them, is great. 

We're also doing a lot of experimentation around social software, which in consumer markets helps get them laid.  Enterprise social software can't do that without risk of lawsuits.  But it can help people get promoted.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Social Software

Gartner Research released the first Magic Quadrant report on the Enterprise Social Software market this week.

This is a pretty big milestone in the development of the Enterprise 2.0 category at-large.  Just a few years ago, the only analysts covering the space were blogalysts.  Now, perhaps the most rigorous and influential vendor analyst reports in enterprise software says it really is enterprise software. The analysis rightly says we all have work to do.

It also says that Socialtext is the most visionary provider and behind only Microsoft, BEA and IBM in execution.  This tells me that if we want to be the leader we need to demonstrate better execution (mind you, I'm not taking out IBM next year, but it is good feedback).  SuiteTwo, of which we are a core component, also scored well in vision but has a way to go in execution.

Microsoft Acquires Parlano, Enterprise 2.0 Group Chat pre-integrated with Socialtext

Microsoft acquired enterprise group chat provider Parlano today for undisclosed terms.  Parlano's MindAlign product has made significant headway in financial services and I first encountered them deployed at Dresdner Klienwort.  Socialtext offers pre-integration with MindAlign, which will be incorporated into Microsoft Office Communications Server and Microsoft Office Communicator, Microsoft’s server and client software for presence, instant messaging, conferencing and VoIP.  We see this news as a further complement to our SocialPoint offering which integrates Socialtext best-of-breed wiki with Sharepoint.

Congratulations to CEO Nick Fera and the good folks at Parlano.  Don Dodge shares how his team at Microsoft brought them in.  There are interesting competitive implications for this acquisition for Cisco, among others.  Early adopters of such technology will probably equate it with industrial strength IRC, and get how vital this kind of tool can be collaboration.

Mobile Enterprise 2.0

Stephen Johnston, my old friend and customer at Nokia, has an extensive post on mobility and Enterprise 2.0.  He provides an overview of the category, survey of existing developments, case for Nokia to participate and builds an argument for open and collaborative development.  Of course, I'll just extract the section on wikis and collective intelligence:

Amazon is often held up as the first example of a service provider that lets users benefit from collective intelligence through their collaborative filtering engine. So, why would this not also work in areas other than books? For example, "intelligent" CRM software could scan the salesperson's customer responses, and suggests appropriate product offerings based on large numbers of other interactions, potentially also outside the company. (Actually, maybe it does already, it’s been a while since I worked in the industry). Most sales people are inherently mobile, and providing lightweight usable tools that expose this collective intelligence at the right time and in the right context, could be a very valuable offering to mobile users.

Wikis are great at capturing user-created intelligence and are rapidly becoming mainstream in the enterprise space, but if you’ve ever tried using one of today’s wikis from your mobile, you’ll appreciate the inherent problems here. Socialtext have been making moves in this regard, but here is a standard chicken-and-egg problem – limited demand resulting in limited development time, begetting limited offerings. UI and synchronization are the key issues to solve. As noted above, services requring smart and big browsers face an uphill struggle on the mobile. Today’s wikis often suggest side-by-side version control review, and require a big screen to see the differences. Synchronization is a key conceptual challenge with mobile, since they generally are not always on. Wikis rely on having one version of the truth – two people making changes to the same item when offline then syncing later makes would vex Schrödinger himself.

Today project managers in Nokia that I work with will generally just create an empty wiki space as they start a new project. This example is being played out across the corporate landscape, and could well disrupt collaboration applications that are built on the assumption that the designers – cut off from the action – know what’s right for each project. Here Nokia’s interests are well aligned with the wiki companies and web services companies in general – do away with the need for a PC and keep the smarts in the cloud. Once bottom up “architectures of participation” are in place, powerful learnings can then be harnessed - enterprise-focused social networking tools (Ryze, Tribe, LinkedIn) are able to unearth links, activities and dependencies around the organization which traditional hierarchies and organizational structures miss.

There are plenty of ways that mobiles could be used as both in-the-field data gatherers, providing relelvant context, or being the mobile manager’s tool of choice for viewing and interacting with the wisdom of the crowds who have gone before.

If you haven't tried Miki the mobile wiki, log on with your Socialtext hosted credentials at http://mi.ki with your mobile web browser.

Cases2.com launched

During his keynote at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, HBS Professor Andrew McAfee put out a call to create a community for sharing case studies on Enterprise 2.0.  After some sharing and prototyping in private, www.cases2.com has launched on a Socialtext wiki.  There are five cases so far:

1. Angel.com (MicroStrategy) case study

2. at&t Collaborative Integration

3. Boston College case study

4. Fidelity Investments Collaborative Integration

5. MWW Group case study

From Suw Charman's live blogging of his keynote:

Need case studies - have a few examples that we fall back on. Our store-houses of success stories needs to expand fairly dramatically if we are going to get traction with decision-makers within companies. What will help them make that decision is verifiable case studies. Need to make sure we don't keep using the same examples over and over. Mustn't get into the trap of coming up with impressive ROI numbers for these techs, Lots of these ROI numbers quoted are 200% - 300%, which makes people ask, if these are true then we should be throwing money into buying software. Those numbers have to be suspect. Don't want us to fall into the trap of coming up with glowing numbers.

Can talk about what happened, at the anecdote or case study level. These are very persuasive. Not all companies have a rigid ROI view of investments, but what they want is ways to triangulate the quality of investment.

Need to address this problem, need a repository of information. If and when we do this we need to throw the gates open as widely as possible - should be emergent, widely accessible, and egalitarian. Need to disclose where this information comes from - it's not automatically suspect when a case study comes from a vendor. Too often, we don't to basic levels of disclosure, so just need some disclosure rules about who's putting information up. Wikipedia has an elaborate set of rules, guidelines and policies which have emerged over time. Not sure what they set of ground rules is needed, but we'll come up with them over time. He volunteers to participate in this effort, what we need is a couple of technologists or vendors to provide environment; perhaps a wiki. Then everyone else throws information up, and structure will emerge over time, as will groundrules, but it would be an invaluable resource for all of us if there's a repository were we can point decision makers to so they can find valuable information.

McAfee put out the call for contribution today:

If you know of an E2.0 case study, please enter any and all details. We don't care if you were directly involved in the project or not, got paid for it or not, etc. We simply ask that you be as honest and forthcoming as possible, cite sources where available, and disclose your relationship(s) to the companies involved.

This last point is critical. It's fine for a vendor or consultant to add information about one of their cases, and it's fine if that information is not verifiable from objective and/or published sources. It's essential, though, that contributors correctly and completely identify themselves and their relationships so that readers have the information necessary to make their own judgments about possible biases.